Essential Practices For Agile Teams

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Yetexperts say that many organizations are falling short because they make superficial adjustments, adding some agile ideas but failing to make the substantial changes needed to sustain an agile approach.

Team composition matters, says Peter Green, principal and leadership development coach at the consulting firm Agile for All. He says the most effective teams are truly cross-functional, comprised of workers from various disciplines working together on a product simultaneously rather than experts in one area (such as development or testing) simply working in sprints before passing work off to the next team of experts.

And these cross-functional teams should include not just technical employees but business-side workers to get maximum value, says Dave West, CEO and product owner of Scrum.org, which provides comprehensive training, assessments and certifications.

Leaders also need to learn a new way of assigning work, West says. They should bring teams to the work, not the other way around. So instead of managers defining a project and crafting a new team to tackle it, they task their existing cross-functional teams with assignments aligned to their business focus and then allow those teams to find solutions and draw on other teams when needed for additional expertise.

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ARTs are self-managing and self-organizing teams of Agile teams that plan, commit, and execute together. Agile Team and ART roles help guide and direct the ART, aligning them to a shared mission and providing the necessary Lean governance.

SAFe has proven to scale in all situations, from complex software and systems development to bond trading and medical devices to memory chips and fighter aircraft. But, with such a robust Framework, the question becomes: how closely does an organization need to follow various SAFe practices to get the desired result?

Also, when diagnosing SAFe implementation problems, it sometimes becomes apparent that enterprises may have skipped or stopped performing some of these critical practices. To support these challenges, the following Ten Critical Success Factors (Figure 2) highlight the minimal SAFe elements necessary for success.

Real Agile Teams and ARTs are fully cross-functional and can define, build and test their work. They have everything and everyone necessary to produce a working, tested increment of the solution. They are self-organizing and self-managing, enabling value to flow more quickly with minimal overhead.

Cadence provides a rhythmic pattern, which offers a steady heartbeat for the development process. It makes routine those things that can be routine. Synchronization allows multiple perspectives to be understood and resolved at the same time. For example, synchronization pulls the various assets of a system together to assess solution-level viability.

No event is more powerful in SAFe than PI planning which provides the rhythm for the ART and connects strategy to execution by ensuring business and technology alignment. PI Planning is where the people who do the work plan the work. Aligning the entire ART with a common vision and goal creates energy and a shared sense of purpose.

SAFe enterprises create a positive customer experience across their products and services. They adopt a DevOps mindset, culture, and applicable technical practices to enable more frequent and higher-quality releases as the market demands. These practices provide faster validation of hypotheses and produce greater profits, increased employee engagement, and more satisfied customers

The Innovation and Planning Iteration occurs every PI and serves multiple purposes. It is an estimating buffer for meeting PI objectives and provides dedicated time for innovation, continuing education, PI Planning, and Inspect and Adapt. IP Iteration activities enable many Lean-Agile principles that foster business agility.

In the nearly 20 years since the Agile Manifesto became a rallying cry for software development teams, organizations have used Agile development practices to deliver value at a rapid pace. Compared to traditional development teams, Agile teams:

When the team, stakeholders and customer have a shared understanding of the goals, they are more likely to get the desired results. The most effective software development teams make collaboration and other Agile best practices their standard way of working.

Organizations operating in dynamic market environments need Agile teams who can work within short development cycles to achieve a faster time-to-market. Particularly in the technology space, Agile teams are desirable because they are more innovative, adaptable and responsive to rapidly changing conditions. Using methods designed to produce frequent, high-quality, sustainable releases, Agile teams can deliver tested, working software in two- to four-week iterations.

How is that possible? An Agile team is a tight-knit group of three to 10 highly skilled people who work together full-time, usually in close proximity. The team has what it takes to get the job done. Individual team members represent diverse functional areas, so programmers, designers, testers, analysts, technical writers and others collaborate throughout the development process. Team members learn to speak the same language, no matter what their discipline. They also put ego aside to ask for and accept help, and they share accountability for the outcomes, both the successes and the rare failures. Teams learn from every iteration, continuously adding to the list of Agile best practices that guide them.

Agile projects are driven by a shared commitment to the values, principles and practices that define the Agile methodology. The 17 authors of the Agile Manifesto were practicing software developers who had experienced a better way to build software. Many of their practices derived from popular frameworks such as Scrum and Kanban. The authors committed a collection of values and principles into writing in 2001, at a gathering of software developers in Snowbird, Utah. Most notably, their Agile practices put people before processes.

The authors of the Agile Manifesto joined with like-minded individuals to form the Agile Alliance, dedicated to sharing information about methods and practices for building more effective software solutions.

Countless Agile best practices and development strategies are now part of the body of knowledge, giving Agile teams the benefit of learning from those before them. Equally important are the best practices concerning how groups of individuals can work together more efficiently and effectively. Even the best developers and testers need to up their interpersonal games to deliver products of value to users. That calls for more effective communication and collaboration among the development team, business stakeholders and the customer.

The customer is satisfied when requirements are fulfilled, expectations are met, and wants and needs are gratified. Short of mindreading, software developers have come up with various ways to discover what the customer wants and to deliver exactly that. Traditionally, teams record user requirements at one end of the funnel, then deliver the product at the other end with negligible customer interaction in between. An Agile team is in near-constant communication with the customer, clarifying expectations, collaborating on fixes, and communicating options not previously considered.

This frequent interaction between the team and the customer is what promotes creativity and heightens quality. The best teams manage the risk of customers coming back with too many changes by collaborating on how to satisfy their demands. Together, they devise a better way to make the product do what users want it to do. It may not work the way the customer initially envisioned, but it will function in a more innovative and sustainable way.

Agile teams operate on the assumption that individuals accomplish more when they rely on each other, than when they rely upon the processes and tools that are the mainstays of software development. Working together empowers and emboldens teams to take the imaginative leaps that produce truly innovative software. Apart from collaboration, simple teamwork is perhaps the most important skill in the lexicon of Agile best practices.

Global teams face significant challenges, not only with geographic isolation of working groups or individuals, but also with time zone differences that limit when team members are available. Creating a virtual room with videoconferencing services, FaceTime mobile devices or cloud-based collaboration software is a passable alternative to in-person conversations. Conference calls, phone/VOIP or group text messages are generally poor substitutes.

Self-organizing teams choose how they will execute the work, and who will do what. They divide the work into increments that can be completed within each iteration, and into tasks that can be completed each day. Management does not assign tasks or look over their shoulders. The team is entrusted with making the right decisions. For this arrangement to work, each team member has to be confident in their work and commit to pushing through the most difficult, frustrating blocks. As a whole, teams share responsibility and accountability, stepping outside of individual roles to resolve issues together. If the outcome misses the mark, the team learns and adapts. Management does not second-guess or redirect.

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