Agile and high performing delivery teams

Establishing and enabling high performing agile delivery teams require bringing together expertise and skills in multiple problem spaces.

Agile

Agility is a blend of several aspects. The biggest could be the willingness to welcome change as a reality and bring in mindfulness and retrospective learning at the team level. Time boxes and iterative methods creates the possibility to respond to changing business needs. They also enable focus. Teams that are self-sufficient and possess cross-functional skills in their domain are naturally empowered to do more.

Delivery

Agile methodologies are best suited for delivering solutions to complex problems that requires collective intelligence. However, in large enterprise environments, successful delivery requires a gamut of skills beyond iterative methods and agile rituals.

...in large enterprise environments, successful delivery requires a gamut of skills beyond iterative methods and agile rituals.

There are the usual technological challenges from disparate systems and stacks, niche or legacy skill sets, mandatory integrations, and strict security and application performance guidelines. From a process point of view, key challenges include managing dependencies across teams and external vendors, manoeuvring through undocumented yet deeply entrenched organisational-level ways of working, the need to visibly maintain a steady flow of business value and avoiding being a victim of the "fail once, crucified forever" approach to product and release quality.

High performance

Delivery efficiency is a step-up and is aligned more with TQM, lean and six sigma. Team performance factors are like non-functional features, they are seldom articulated well and are dictated by the environment or hidden away in a vision or purpose statement. Although agile teams innately have the biggest advantage due to inspect and adapt cycles, it is never easy to predict whether your next significant bottleneck is culture, team dynamics, skills, process or technology. Add to that the lack of formal funding for continuous improvement, which requires change to be embedded into the day-to-day way of working.

As an example, the team I currently work with has the mandate to handle a high volume of simultaneous projects - I've heard that just once and I'm not sure if the team has ever heard that from anyone other than me. The ability to switch context rapidly was identified to be our super power. We have embraced and enabled that with several careful changes across our delivery life cycle, engineering practices, collaboration and knowledge management, product ownership, cognition, mindfulness and team behaviour.

Large scale delivery is arduous; high performing agile delivery teams are almost magical.

Large scale delivery is arduous; high performing agile delivery teams are almost magical. Having worked with a variety of teams, my observation is that the teams that have the collective ability to make changes across mindset, technology and processes, without having to wait for external support, are the ones who really pull off high performance on a regular basis.

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Posted under: High Performing Teams