In this article, Chris Fry tells us how to unlock the power of teams.
Why are teams important? A couple reasons.
- Teams are the atomic unit of growth in Agile. In fact, you resource at the team level. If you have five teams, you should have only five projects.
- It's crazy difficult to increase a person's performance by a factor of three or four. Yet, with a team, in a couple months it's possible to increase performance by a factor of four.
Chris, a system's thinker, believes there are four things you can do to move the needle:
- Build strong teams first.
- Go modular. Remove dependencies.
- Establish a short, regular ship cycle.
- Keep teams together.
I agree with modular design. Because modular design equals speed. And speed kills. Kills your competition.
Keeping teams together helps make teams stable. Same group of people working on projects for some time. These teams are cross-functional and have all the skills to deliver working software.
Bring the work to a stable team, do not break up teams and bring people to projects.
For more on Stable Teams, see the Scrum Pattern -- Stable Teams.