Pym-teams for business agility

How do you scale rapidly for a digital transformation?

The concept of Pym teams come from my learnings through the early days of digital transformation at a regional Australian bank. The goal was to launch a brand new mobile app that brought together all products across banking, insurance and wealth management. I was tasked with scaling the team to deliver crucial digital APIs and infrastructure. We had to grow rapidly without slowing down.

I realised that my challenge was to create a team that could change size on a short notice to ensure that we always had the optimum capacity. And thanks to a great group of people, we were able to do that! We added people and skills just-in-time to be able to deliver features and components. We became the team that would pick-up features outside our usual expertise that the regular teams couldn't develop to due to capacity constraints. I believe we punched above our weight to make the mobile app a reality! Interestingly, we also ramped down after a while and started growing soon again to meet the demand for the next business strategy cycle to delivery regulatory work.

Adapting delivery capacity to meet fluctuating business needs

If the key benefit of agility is to respond to changing business needs, the ability to scale or ramp-down rapidly to balance demand and supply is a key enabler for business agility.

Stable teams with minimum or zero changes to team composition is an agile best practice. Stability allows a team to settle in. Stability fosters better levels of collaboration – no doubt about that. The stable team pattern, in its purest sense, keeps the capability constant with the goal of maximising productivity. Value optimisation is achieved through prioritisation, where features with the best value are prioritised for delivery.

As much as it makes sense from the point of view of a team, organisations often find themselves in situations where changes in strategy or market conditions require capability over and above what is currently available. A flurry of regulatory changes is an example. Digital transformation is another example. Yet another example could be a game-changing innovation that is time-critical. When demand increases, the ability to scale delivery capability determines the organisational ability to be successful or even capitalise on opportunities. The converse also happens when teams needed to be ramped down to meet a drop in demand. If not, there would be waste and inefficiencies from idle capacity.

If the key benefit of agility is to respond to changing business needs, the ability to scale or ramp-down rapidly to balance demand and supply is a key enabler for business agility.

Traditionally this is achieved by establishing new teams. However it takes time to recruit people and even more time for the team to settle into a good delivery cadence. What if there is a better way to do this?

Introducing Pym-teams

Size shifting is a super ability from the realm of science fiction and comics. Ant-Man has it! He can change his size at will. You don’t need to be the Ant to peep through a key hole, but you definitely need to be one to pass through. You need to go sub-atomic to sneak through molecular gaps, but you might also need to be a Giant-Man once a while.

What if teams can have that super-ability to change size in order to deal with everything thrown at them? Because the capability comes from the suit and not the man, I want to honour the fictional creator Hank Pym and call teams that possess this ability to size-shift as Pym-teams. After all, we in the agile world tend to borrow abundantly from sci-fi.

Pym-teams are based on cross-functional teams, another best practice where teams are resourced with all the domain skills required to deliver the task or feature at hand. Cross-functional teams are able to independently deliver with minimal external dependencies. This improves speed and quality because collaboration and feedback happens mostly within the team.

Pym-teams think differently

Pym-teams are cross-functional teams that have embraced systems thinking to prioritise business agility over team stability.

Pym-teams are cross-functional teams that have embraced systems thinking to prioritise business agility over team stability. They acknowledge that it is more important for the organisation to be able to vary delivery capability as required. They value business performance over team stability.

Pym-teams are an opportunity to bring what the cloud has brought into computing – scale capacity on demand. The concept is not totally new either – organisations at the provider end of the outsourcing boom definitely had their own strategies to ramp up demand as the market grew.

Traditionally the responsibility for the growth and ramp-down has been with the chapters or the portfolio or the PMO, depending on how your organisation works. However Pym-teams would seek to own this within the team as a team capability.

Building a Pym-team

The first challenge for a Pym-team is to sustain the efficiency and high-performance even while you are scaling. The second challenge is to not lose key capabilities when you ramp-down, so that you are scale again on demand.

Building a Pym-team is akin to building a few practices at the same time. This is because you may need to scale every capability or skill within your team. So, understanding the various skills required for delivery within your organisation is usually the first step to building Pym-teams.

The usual best practices in practice development including onboarding, community leadership for coaching and mentoring, competence management, knowledge management and process consistency are all valid for building Pym-teams. That’s probably a topic for another article!

Picture credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/gorex2uSs7s

Posted under: Business Agility, High Performing Teams, Agile Thought Leadership