Tag Archives: skills matrix

Real Agility – Self-Organizing Team Creation Event for Large-Scale Agile Enterprises

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In 2005 I had the privilege to participate in the first occurrence of this fantastic technique for organizing large numbers of people into Agile teams.  It happened at Capital One in Richmond Virginia and my colleague of the time, Kara Silva, led this successful experiment.  The problem was that the “teams” that management had set up didn’t make much sense from an Agile perspective.  They were functional teams (e.g. a team of testers).  But to do Agile well, they needed cross-functional, multi-skilled teams that could work well together to deliver great results each iteration.  So Kara and a few other senior people got together all the staff in the department into a big room with a big whiteboard and facilitated a 3 hour meeting to sort out who would be on which team.  Everyone was involved – all the people who would be on the teams were in the room.  Those teams stayed together with the same membership long after that meeting.

This “team creation event” was a fantastic success for that particular department.  What made it a success?

  1. Everyone participating already had Agile training and experience.  They knew what they were getting into and why they were doing it.
  2. Everyone was encouraged to participate through the way the meeting was facilitated.  No one felt like their opinion was ignored.
  3. The meeting was long, but also time boxed.  It wasn’t an open-ended discussion that could go forever.
  4. It was in-person!!!  Everyone was physically present so that not just abstract facts, but also feelings were clearly visible to everyone else.
  5. It was honest: tough things were discussed including potential personality conflicts.  This open discussion required expert facilitation.
  6. Management was not involved in the decision-making during the meeting.
  7. The overall purpose of the exercise was clear: here’s the business we’re in, and here’s the people we have to work with – how can we organize ourselves to be most effective?
  8. A big diagram of the proposed teams and their membership was constantly being updated on a whiteboard: visual and concrete for everyone to see.
  9. Preparation: the meeting was scheduled far enough in advance that everyone could make it and management was informed about how important it was (don’t schedule over top of it!)

In the Real Agility Program, the team creation event is used to launch a Delivery Group.  The key people at the meeting include all the potential team members as well as the three Real Agility Coaches from the business, from technology, and from process/people.  Depending on the number of people involved, the team creation event can take anywhere from two hours up to a full day.  Longer is not recommended.  For larger Delivery Groups, we recommend that the team creation event be held off-site.

Facilitation of the team creation event is usually done by the process/people Real Agility Coach.  If you wanted to use this process with other enterprise Agile frameworks such as SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) you would have the “equivalent” person such as SAFe’s Release Train Engineer as the facilitator.

The team creation event should only be done when the business is ready to get a Delivery Group started on actual product, project or program work.  If there is any significant delay between the team creation event and the launch of the Delivery Group on it’s work, then the teams can fracture and you may need to run the event again.  A few days should be the maximum delay.

One client we worked with ran the team creation event but had some significant problems afterward because they weren’t really ready.  In particular, they still had to make staffing changes (primarily letting go of some contractors, hiring some new full-time employees).  As a result, the teams created in the team creation event were not really properly stable.  This caused a great deal of disruption and even significant morale problems for some teams.  It is essential that the Leadership Team be committed to keeping the team membership stable for a significant period of time after the team creation event.  That includes any necessary means to encourage people who are thinking of leaving to reconsider.  It also includes a commitment from leadership to respect the self-organizing choices made during the team creation event unless there is an extremely urgent problem with the results.

So, to make it systematic, here are the steps required to run a team creation event:

PREPARATION

  1. Make sure that everyone who will participate has Agile training and has been on an Agile team for at least a few iterations/sprints/cycles.
  2. The Leadership Team needs to publish a notice (usually through email) explaining the upcoming team creation event and their unqualified support for the event.
  3. The people/process Real Agility Coach needs to schedule the time for the event, and if necessary, book the venue.
  4. In the weeks and days leading up to the event, some communication should be provided to all the participants about the overall business purpose of the Delivery Group.  Is it for a specific Program?  If so, what is the objective of the program from a business perspective?  It should not just be a one-time communication.  This should come from the business Real Agility Coach.
  5. The Leadership Team needs to decide which management stakeholders will attend the team creation event and make presentations.  These presentations should be about setting a vision for the Delivery Group, not about assigning people to teams.

TEAM CREATION EVENT AGENDA

  1. The team creation event starts with the people/process Real Agility Coach welcoming people and reiterating the purpose of the event.
  2. Management stakeholders make their presentations to ensure that participants have a clear vision.
  3. The business Real Agility Coach summarizes the vision presented by the management stakeholders.
  4. The people/process Real Agility Coach provides instructions about the constraints for a good Agile Delivery Team:
    • Cross-functional
    • Multi-skilled (see the Skills Matrix tool for ideas here).
    • Correct size (usually 7 +/- 2).
    • People who want to work with each other.
    • People who want to work on that particular team’s goal (if such is set).
    • Everyone must be on a team.
    • Every team must choose the people who will fill the Agile Delivery Team roles (e.g. ScrumMaster and Product owner for Scrum Delivery Teams).
  5. Everyone starts self-organizing!  Usually the three Real Agility Coaches circulate through the teams as they are working to organize themselves to offer gentle guidance, to answer questions, and to see if there are opportunities to optimize across teams.  These optimization opportunities should always be offered as suggestions rather than being directive.
  6. As the self-organization is happening, the people/process Real Agility Coach needs to clearly indicate the passage of time so that people are “finished” when the time has run out.
  7. Once the self-organizing is done, the Leadership Team (or a representative) thanks everyone for their work in creating the teams and agrees to let everyone know within a short period of time if there are any changes required (to be done before the teams start working).
  8. The people/process Real Agility Coach closes the meeting.  It is critical to record the final results of who is on which team.  It may be easiest to get the teams themselves to do this before leaving the meeting.

FOLLOW-UP

  1. The people/process Real Agility Coach makes sure that the Leadership Team receives a complete and accurate record of the results of the team creation event before the end of the day.
  2. The Leadership Team reviews the results and makes any (minor but critical) adjustments within a few days, at most, and publishes the final list to everyone.  Failure to do this in a timely manner can deeply demoralize the staff who will be in the Delivery Group.
  3. Any updates to org charts, management tools, time tracking tools, job descriptions, etc. that need to reflect the new team organization should also be made immediately and certainly before the Delivery Group starts working.
  4. A final thank you message from the Leadership team should be delivered immediately prior to the start of the Delivery Group doing its work.

Have you experienced an event like this? Did it work? What was different from what I described?

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Leveraging the Team for Good PDPs (if you need them)

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I am currently working with a relatively new Scrum team (5 Sprints/weeks young) that needs to rewrite their Personal Development Plans (PDPs) in order to better support Scrum and the team.  PDPs are still the deliverables of individuals required by the organization and likely will be for some time.  The organization is still in the early days of Agile adoption (pilots) and they are large.  So, instead of giving them a sermon on why metrics for managed individuals are bad, I am going to help them take the step towards Agility that they are ready to take.

The Plan:

  • Facilitate a team workshop to create an initial Skills Matrix;
  • work as a team to develop a PDP for each individual team member that directly supports the team’s high-performance Goal (already established)—
    • in other words, when considering an appropriate PDP per individual, the team will start with the team’s performance Goal and build the individual PDP from there;
  • develop a plan as a team for how the team will support each team member to fulfill his/her individual PDP—
    • in other words, all individual PDPs will be part of the team’s plan for team improvement;
  • Internally publish the plan (share with management).

I’ll follow up with another post to let everyone know how it goes.

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Leaving your title at the Scrum team room door and pick up new skills!

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Each member of an organization has a title or designation that may reflect their responsibilities or profession.  These titles may include BA, Tester, Developer, QA, PM, and others.  It is normal to be proud of our accomplishments, achievements and titles.  Unfortunately in a Scrum team these titles can limit the individual and adversely effect the team.  These same titles can label the individual as that role (example – as a tester) and only that role.  Within a Scrum team we certainly need the skills, knowledge and abilities that come with that title/role, but we do not want to limit that person to being viewed as only that role.  Each of us is the sum total of our experience, education, values, upbringing and history.  All of this is of value to the team.  We should encourage every member to fully participate on the team, to willingly share their expertise, to contribute to non-traditional tasks and to feel they are valued as a complete person rather than a specifically titled individual.   So if the goal is to leave your title behind, then it is implied you can also pick up other skills.
So how can this be accomplished.  One way is a Skills Matrix.   This is a chart that can be posted in the room to identify the skills needed and the people on the team.   On the left column you list all the team members.  Along the top you list all the various skills you need on the team.  Then each person reviews their row, looking at each skill, and then identifies how many quadrants of each circle they can fill in, based on the range below the chart.  The range is from no skills through to teach all skills in a given column.  After filling the columns and rows, now the work begins.  By using pair programming (an extreme programming method) and other methods like self-study and taking additional courses, the team member can begin to learn other skills.  The objective is to have at least two persons on each team who possess each of the skills at the level of performing all the tasks of a specific skill.  The goal is not to have every one do everything but to have a least enough people with specific skills to cover sicknesses and vacations so that required tasks are performed.  This is a method to capture the full extend of each person’s current knowledge, skills and abilities and expand on it.
Skills Matrix
Since they are hard to see, here are the labels for the number of quadrants:
0: no skill
1: basic knowledge
2: perform basic tasks
3: perform all tasks (expert)
4: teach all tasks
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The Skills Matrix and Performance Evaluation on Agile Teams

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For a few years now I have been working with managers and executives to help them do Agile-compatible performance evaluations of their staff.  The method that has been most successful is based on a tool that comes from the book Toyota Talent called the “Skills Matrix”.  The basic approach follows these steps:

  1. Baseline the skills within a team for each team member.
  2. Set development goals and action items.
  3. Regularly review performance in relation to the development goals.

Of course, the details matter.  The OpenAgile Center for Learning has published a brief overview of how to use the Skills Matrix and a convenient A0-size pdf that can be used as a template for a team’s Skills Matrix.  I highly recommend using these to get started.  If you are a manager, ask your ScrumMaster or Process Facilitator to arrange and facilitate a team workshop to do the initial population of the Skills Matrix, rather than doing it yourself.  Once that is done you have a baseline and you should take regular digital photos of the team’s Skills Matrix for record-keeping and as a backup in case of disputes.  You should also let the team know that you will be basing performance reviews on how they improve their skills.

The development goals that team members set then should be made such that every team member understands that they have a responsibility to diversify their own skill set and assist other team members in doing this.  As a manager, you should review each team members’ goals for development and provide mentoring support when needed.  At the end of a fixed period of time (quarterly is a reasonable period), you will review each team member’s development relative to the baseline and the goals set.  Of course, normal guidance around performance (or lack thereof) can be given at these regular reviews.

I strongly recommend reading “Drive” by Daniel Pink as an important adjunct to understanding how to do performance reviews for individuals in an Agile environment.  In particular, individual performance reviews should not be tied to bonuses.  If bonuses are used at all, they should be measured and delivered purely at the team level or organization level without measuring individual contribution.

Of course, Agile team performance can’t simply be measured in terms of skills alone.  Performance must also be related to bottom-line results.  This part of performance measurement is separate from the development of the team.  Another aspect of Agile team performance is how well they are doing Agile itself.  Depending on the Agile method you use, there may be various tools to help with this (I would recommend our new product the Scrum Team Assessment as one possible consideration).

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