Focus on Team Health
Team health sums up the ability of the team to work together as a stable, coherent group. Collaboration is facilitated by the quality of the relationships between the team members, founded on a culture of trust. Healthy teams are teams that are able to disagree and use that disagreement to improve the work they are doing and how that work is done.
In A Nutshell
Every team goes through periods when it does not function at its optimum. Personal circumstances, changes in the organisation or other factors create friction within the team. Rigour and discipline declines, rate of delivery and quality of service are reduced. Teams need to be transparent and honest about the condition of the team - but this openness can be challenging to achieve if there is conflict within the team.
Team health can also suffer if the context surrounding the team is not supportive. Problems may be created because there are problems with Product Health. If the organisation is not protective of the autonomy of the team, it may be disrupted by management action outside the team.
Teams need to be aware of the signs that team health is declining. Leadership must be observant and provide advice and guidance to teams that are in danger of falling into dysfunction.
Practices
Acting On Feedback
An alternative to assessing the health of the team is to assess the health of the product they are working on. Product Health focuses on the whole product life-cycle; it covers both rate of development and quality of service. Product Health assessment recognises that the health of many teams is largely determined by the context in which they work. In a scaled environment, multiple teams can participate in the assessment of the same product.
Teams are encouraged to evaluate their own team health using a set of objective criteria. These criteria may be shared across multiple teams. Regular assessment of team health supports the analysis of trends. Individual trends typically reflect work undertaken by specific teams to resolve issues. Trends seen across multiple teams may also reflect the effect of changes made organisationally.
New teams climb a steep learning curve and must progress through the stages of the group development model. Existing teams may experience periods of reduced performance, turbulence or conflict. These are circumstances in which it is desirable to support the team with coaching. Coaching helps guide the team as it acquires new knowledge or as it navigates its problems.
Frequent, effective feedback is central to the agile mindset - it is at the heart of how we inspect and adapt in order to get better at what we do. Personal feedback is one of the most valuable ways of improving our agile performance. It is also one of the most challenging aspects of anAgileMind. It is challenging both for those who give the feedback and for those receiving it too.
The Sprint Retrospective is a Scrum event. Its purpose is to allow the team to inspect and adapt its way of working, the functioning of the team, the working context and all other factors which may impact the team’s ability to deliver its goals. Some factors the team have direct control over, other factors will require external influence to change.
To deliver and support the product the team needs a full range of skills to avoid reliance on other teams, experts and other potential points of failure. The team needs to sustain its abilities in the face of inevitable changes in membership. It also needs to take account of developments in the technology it already uses and of the need to adopt new technologies that may be forecast in the product’s roadmap.
The capacity of the teams delivering a product constrains the rate at which new features can be added and feature improvements delivered. Sustaining capacity relative to demand over time is important because of the high cost of trying to change quickly. The rate of change of capacity is limited by the requirement for teams to adjust to changing membership and for new team members to acquire the ability to deliver.