Agile Team….

Introduction: This post gives us an approach of transitioning to an Agile Team from a traditional mode of working. There are numerous ways of tackling this problem, would be happy if this post serves as a starting point.

Agile is a way to go, currently, that is a buzz word in the current competitive world, there are lots of talks of approaches that need to be followed for a successful Agile Transformations. There is another important part that needs to be managed during the Transition, Traditional Team to an Agile Team.

Agile Team Transformation is the most critical part of the transformation. Let’s first understand what is an Agile Team. An ideal Agile Team is a team where all the team members are cross skilled and can take up any task, there is no division of responsibilities as we had earlier (for example … Developer and Tester) but the ideal world would be unsuitable in many real-life scenarios, below is an approach that I feel would help in achieving this

Training and Up-skilling: Training and up-skilling, this is one of the most critical areas but it should be managed to promote learning. The general approach followed is to do some web-based training and that’s it you are a master, this does let make anyone learn.

How to Train?: This scenario might look very ideal and you might have the feeling that this will take time but it can give you the results you need. First and foremost is motivate the person, create an environment that will make the person contribute. let us take an example:

If you feel a resource does not contribute, what would be your normal reaction?. you might call him for a meet and explain to him that he needs to be innovative and this is going to add up to his feedback and stuff, this is not going to give you results. This is similar to someone pointing a gun at you and asking you for money, this will only create pressure and stress. Let’s look at a different angle.

Here we go.. :-)

Have an informal meet with the resource to understand how things are with him, hows the project, his feedback on work what he feels can be improved, never speak anything on his feedback, instead ask him something like, I need some suggestion, was wondering on how can we improve the process we follow? , if he does not open up first meet it is perfectly fine, amicably end the informal discussion and move on, have another informal meet after a couple of days, start by appreciating some work he has done and ask him did you give a thought to what we had discussed? He might definitely say something this time. Ask him if we start some improvement work with a small team as this would benefit us.

He would definitely gather some interested people with him for taking this forward. Appreciation does wonders for sure.

In a similar fashion form teams of aspirants in the area of their interest and how would you like to learn this, let them come with an idea. once a group reaches consensus, nominate a person among them who could track the progress of the group. This will take time but can yield better results.

The second important point for an Agile team, avoid mentioning the role a person does (like an Analyst, Developer, Lead, etc..), just refer to them as Team and address the by names, this would help in avoiding conflicts, this is similar to coming to school in uniform. Generally based on my experience have seen the addressing issue still exists, this will not help in adopting many Agile principles like (self-organizing teams, openness team Behaviour etc..). As per the manifesto Individuals and interactions over processes and tools, this word Team holds true.

Work Assignment: If you want a cross skilled team, practice pair programming initially, gradually start assigning them individual work, each time pair different sets of team members. The team would gradually tend towards an ideal Agile Team.

These are some points I could think off, again this purely based on my experience, and some points might not be fully applicable, it is just a thought which I felt like sharing. It would be difficult for a large corporate company to accept this approach. The model Agile has always excited me as it is more of the people for the people and by the people.

Hope this Helps :-)

Thank you for Reading and making to the end, you Rock :-)

Will Continue…