What is an Agile Team?
An Agile Team is a group of individuals working toward a collective goal. It typically consists of 10 members or less that together have the skills to deliver value to the customer. This includes the ability to define the work, build or do the work, test the work, and ultimately, release or deliver it to the customer.
This is a cross-functional team as they have all the necessary skills to complete and deliver the work. There is often a perception with a cross-functional team that everyone on the team needs to be able to do everyone else’s job. That, however, isn’t the case; we are looking for the team to have the skills, not each individual.
As we consider high-performing teams, we are looking for individuals to be able to flex and help in other areas outside of their primary expertise to ensure long-term team success. An example would be a person who primarily develops code but could help develop test scripts or execute tests. We would then consider this person to be T-Shaped. A T-Shaped individual has a deep area of expertise, and knowledge in other areas, although not as deep as their primary competency.
When we build our teams, we want to optimize them to allow for effective communication and to deliver value each iteration. Often when building a team, you will need individuals from different parts of the organization to work together. This helps improve communication and reduces handoffs and thus waste.
A second consideration when creating a team is that they are self-organized and self-managed. This doesn’t always mean that teams get to do what they want when they want, but that they are aligned toward delivering value and are organized in a way that allows them to be largely self-sufficient and, over time, become self-managing.
Pro tip
Can the teams really be self-organized? If you haven’t read Sandy Mamoli’s book Creating Great Teams: How Self-Selection Lets People Excel [11], then I suggest that you add it to your reading list. However, you must read the Pretty Agile Blog of Team Self-Selection with SAFe® and Structuring the ART [1]. This is a practical example of how this can be achieved with an ART.
When we establish teams, they don’t naturally work together seamlessly from day one. All teams, including professional sports teams, mature to become high-performing teams. Tuckman [2] has defined four stages of group development that teams progress through to become high performing. Tuckman later refined his theory in 1975 and added a fifth stage to the Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing model: Adjourning. This is also referred to as Deforming and Mourning.
Figure 2.1 – Tuckman’s stages of team dynamics (© Scaled Agile, Inc.)
Our high-performing teams know each other, their strengths, and their weaknesses, and work together on a daily basis for as long a period of time as possible. Long-lived teams are key to long-term success as this allows the team to progress through the stages to achieve high performance.
As an organization, it is important to create a working environment for the teams to work together. This may involve investing in infrastructure and tooling, supporting team formation (for example, supporting social time or team building events), establishing working agreements, and rewarding teams and not just individual performance.
To ensure success, Agile Teams have two key roles that are members of the team: the Product Owner (PO) and the Scrum Master/Team Coach (SM/TC).
