I’m seriously concerned about this topic because I see the disastrous effects of its bad handling every day. It’s not enough to put some people together and ask them, usually in a perverse, detached and manipulative way, that no matter the difficulties encountered, they should make it work because this is what professionals do – in a way this is like an abdication of the job a manager should do rigorously. I know it’s hard, damn hard, I made my share of mistakes …
I wrote about this topic before.
But this time I would like to recall two important perspectives, from the agile world, that unfortunately seem to be ignored:
1. Early this year a nice interview(1) with Jerry Weinberg was published. In it, he described one method to form a team:
“…We put together teams. What I recommend is people put together their agile teams by what I call incremental consensus. You start with one person who you feel has the personal qualities. Stop emphasizing very soon with what I read about is people emphasizing: you got to have the most skilled coder and you can put all the best coders together and then you have an agile team. Now you find someone who has got these personal qualities: they know how to communicate , they’re willing to communicate, they’re willing to admit their mistakes and learn. And you start with that person. And you say: okay now among all the people we have available to us who would you like most to team up with to do a good job; you understand the agile principles. And they choose of course… it’s one person so it’s a consensus and the person has to want to be on it … Now you have two people. Now you say to them: okay now come to an agreement on who else you’d like to have. If you started with the right person the process goes on and they put together a team that really does well; and they take awhile to learn but they can learn the skills, technical skills, more easily than they can learn the personal skills, the people’s skills as we call them…”
In 2016, after a horrible month of solving some issues, with a delicate suite of products, I realized that this is the time when the core problem could be solved. It could be solved because the key persons were prepared to allow the kind of work I had in my mind for almost 2 years. In that terrible month, I have worked with some wonderful people to fix the problems. I knew that the kind of work I wanted to do needed special people. Even before I spoke with the management, I spoke with each of them separately. I told them what I had in mind and the persons I wanted to do the work with. I needed their green light regarding the work that needs to be done, their future colleagues and if they were willing to join the team. I left them time to reflect on all those things. In this time I talked with no one else. After several days we spoke again, separately, and each of them gave the green light. Then I spoke with management and it was hard…but I was determined, if one of them could not join the new setup, I would not take in charge that new project/product. I wanted from each of the future team members their consensus. And as Jerry Weinberg said, it was not only about the technical skills of these people, it was much much more. Please watch the Jerry Weinberg interview.
2. Scrum Plop(2) – I am amazed that so many Scrum people, from my circles, are not aware of this. It’s about patterns that show and help on how to implement Scrum. If Scrum guide seems abstract and hard to be decoded, well these patterns help a lot in making sense on how to implement Scrum. There is a pattern called Stable Teams(3) which accurately articulates the problem and also gives a solution:
“…Keep teams stable and avoid shuffling people around between teams. Stable teams tend to get to know their capacity, which makes it possible for the business to have some predictability. Dedicate team members to a single team whenever possible. Members of Stable Teams get to know each other. The team members experience each other’s work style and learn how much work they can do together. A Stable Team grows in familiarity and consistency of meeting mutual expectations and starts developing a Community of Trust…. what is often forgotten when measuring a team’s velocity is that the only way that a team can get to know their velocity is by having the same team members over a longer period of time…”
Trust is a key/serious/important word. Trust takes time because is arising from people interactions over a certain period of time. You cannot create a roadmap or a checklist on how to build trust within a team.
Since I mentioned Scrum above, it is important to also mention 2 important related details about it:
– an important detail, also applicable to teams, is about competence(4)/skill/mastery/expertise. Although this is an aspect that is not explicitly specified in the Scrum guide, it is a sine qua non condition for Scrum to work;
– management plays an important role when forming the team. Not an easy thing to do. But after they’ve formed the team, they should trust them and let them accomplish their mission(5).
Conclusion:
Every time I think about this subject, I think about families. Look at families, at how delicate things can get sometimes, because family members can’t get along with each other. And it’s not like this problem can be easily solved by a parent, for example, by just saying: “hey, you are brothers, you are supposed to get along”. Some will say, when speaking about team members, that it’s not about friends or family members. And I say “Exactly. It’s even harder and it’s not that easy to impose things”. So, I imagine that for some managers it’s easier to pretend that they don’t know things/techniques on forming a team, and then use some fancy words and clichés to “solve it”, thus tossing the effort they should have done onto the shoulders of other people. But the reality has its own style to deny certain approaches/ideas/opinions.
What was a surprise for me is that it can be really really dangerous to desire having a Stable Team. The surprise was even bigger that the danger came from people which actually, at least declaratively, supports and promotes Scrum and agility.
(1) Jerry Weinberg, “Agile for Humans #26: Agile Impressions and Errors with Jerry Weinberg”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_AOoSnhE-8
(2) Scrum Pattern Community, Jim Coplien – Product Owner for the Scrum Patterns effort, http://www.scrumplop.org/
(3) Stable Teams Pattern, https://sites.google.com/a/scrumplop.org/published-patterns/product-organization-pattern-language/development-team/stable-teams
(4) Jim Coplien, “Ten things scrummers do wrong”, https://vimeo.com/42772592
(5) Alistair Cockburn, “Core scrum, barnacles, rumors and hearsay, improved version”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuUadPoi35M