Team building has always been a challenge, not just since the advent of agile frameworks and the resulting emphasis on self-organization, engagement, and achieving a valuable objective. This post covers four team building mental models — or concepts — that have proven useful in understanding the context of creating agile teams: from Taylorism to Tuckman to Lencioni to Dan Pink.
Do you need an emergency fund as a change agent—whether you are acting as Scrum Master, Product Owner or agile coach—because conflict is inevitable, but change is not?
In my experience, speaking truth to power, pointing at the emperor’s new clothes and the reality in the trenches, is necessary a trait for every change agent — including Scrum Masters and agile coaches — in organizations that lack strong leadership.
Learn more, how this form of professional honesty can backfire when the incumbents, privileged by the existing system, strike back.
Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim latest book Accelerate: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations [advertising] describes the factors that drive high-performing tech organizations, derived from the data that has been aggregated with the State of DevOps Report since 2014.
“Accelerate” [advertising] is a must-read book for anyone involved in building agile organizations and teams. It lays out a path to success based on a statistical analysis of data. It also puts an end to the popular narrative that ’becoming agile’ is somehow a fuzzy process. The data shows that there are patterns at all levels that successful agile organizations share.
In other words: becoming agile can be data-driven. (A hypothesis that I shared in How to Measure Agility of Organizations and Teams—The Results of the Agile Maturity Survey earlier.)
Master autonomy purpose — in this article, I present a slightly different way of viewing agile maturity, through Dan Pink's lens of Mastery, Autonomy, and Purpose; as a simple and useful way of fostering conversations and ensuring all relevant perspectives are considered.
Creating an agile community of practice helps winning hearts and minds within the organization as it provides authenticity to the agile transition — signaling that the effort is not merely another management fad. Read more to learn how to get your agile community going even without a dedicated budget.
Learn how individual incentives and outdated organizational structures — fostering personal agendas and local optimization efforts — manifest themselves in scrum stakeholder anti-patterns which easily can impede any agile transition.
