Home

Building High-Performance Agile Teams

Tue, 2008-02-26 07:39 — Paul Hodgetts
keywords:
room: Dominion South, 2 — time: Tuesday 16:00-17:30
Average Rating: -

Without a doubt, agile processes rely on effective collaborative teams. But we can’t just throw a group of individuals together and expect an agile team to just happen. It takes knowledge of team strategies, skillful team building and ongoing coaching to build and maintain high-performing agile teams.

In this tutorial, we’ll explore the very nature of agile teams and how they are formed. We’ll discuss the nature of leadership within teams of peers, and how to motivate teams to take the initiative and self-organize. We’ll cover how to run effective team meetings, how to reach agreements as a group, how to resolve conflicts and how to form a team that continuously learns how to better work together.

Throughout the tutorial we’ll participate in targeted exercises that illustrate aspects of team skills, and help us to think differently about how to work together as a team.

This tutorial is intended for team members who need to work together as a team and for managers and leaders who need to form effectively agile teams. No prerequisites are required

Process/Mechanics

This session is a combination of light lecture and targeted scenario solving exercises. The lecture introduces concepts and techniques. Some techniques are reinforced with short exercises to practice the techniques. Key concepts are reinforced by providing situations that require the application of collaborative team thinking to best solve, and having the participants develop potential solutions and approaches in small teams.

The anticipated mix of lecture to exercise is about 60-40, based on similar training courses and workshops I’ve conducted before on this topic. If the attendee count is small, the percentage of exercise will likely go up. Larger groups generally need more explanation and discussion during the lecture activities.

The anticipated tutorial agenda outline is:

Essential Characteristics of Teams:

  1. Where are we at now? Conventional approaches for group development.
  2. Why is a team approach better?
  3. What exactly is a “team?”
  4. Degrees of team self-determination.
  5. Team size and membership.
  6. Beginning the formation of a true team.

Developing an Effective Agile Team:

  1. Models of team formation and development.
  2. Team norms.
  3. Responsibility and accountability in teams.
  4. Tools for expressing team culture: charters, expectations, ground rules

Getting Results from Collaborative Activities:

  1. Collaborations vs. meetings.
  2. Attendance and substitutions.
  3. Information management.
  4. Agenda management.
  5. Tips for participants.
  6. Tips for facilitators.

Making Decisions and Solving Problems:

  1. A team decision-making framework.
  2. Tools for decision-making: brainstorming, thinking tools, reaching closure.
  3. Constructive behavior when decision making.
  4. Obstacles and pitfalls to decision-making.
  5. Handling conflict.

Healthy Team Environments:

  1. Place and time.
  2. Workspaces.
  3. Handling virtual teams.

Teams That Learn:

  1. Attributes of learning teams.
  2. Obstacles to team learning.
  3. Team building and learning are holistic.
  4. Renewal and learning.
  5. Where are we? Measurements and metrics.

Leadership and Followership in Teams

  1. What is leadership? It’s not control!
  2. Successful leadership practices.
  3. Attributes of good leaders.
  4. Followership - the missing role.
  5. Effective followership behaviors.
  6. Increasing your competence as a team member.
  7. Relationship building.