Agile Engineering - page 5

A key part of any good team, especially an agile team, is teamwork and more importantly a team of hardworking individuals that both care about their teammates and they understand the strengths of their fellow teammates.  In the sporting world you will often hear of situations where one player will attempt to play outside his strengths.  Or what is more prevalent, a player has an outstanding year due to either scheme or competition or simply a well formed team that emphasizes the strengths of the players.  Then that player is a free-agent and goes to another team, and the player’s career sags.  This is primarily due to familiarity, chemistry, and scheme that doesn’t fit the strengths of the player.

There is a concept that surrounds Scrum teams and that is the concept of “self-organizing” team.  Now this concept is often not clearly defined and depending on the Agile coach and or trainer, a team member might view this differently (see Does Self Organizing Team Imply Self Assembly?) .  Nonetheless, if we define self-organizing in the simplest form of a team that has the ability to take inputs and based on knowing certain attributes of their fellow team members, work is doled out, people are paired up, issues are worked out, team members are brought in and pushed out, and, in summary, things just start getting done and done effectively.

The “certain attributes” that a team uses for team self-organization often includes:

• Team member workload
• Technical background
• Domain expertise
• Team member availability
• Understanding of the tasks-at-hand
• Priority of tasks
• Team member “likes”
• Team member weaknesses
• Team member strengths

Of course, all of these are important to consider; however, one would argue that the strengths are where all self-organizing should be focused.  As you guessed it, I’m the one to make this argument – and I encourage everyone who runs any type of team to take advantage of Clifton StrengthsFinder from the Gallup News organization (yes, that’s the same Gallup that does many politico and social polls).   StrengthsFinder came about from Dr. David Clifton – he is known as the father of Strengths Psychology.  The focus of StrengthsFinder is to help people identify their top five strenghts where they work best, understand these strengths, and see how focusing on using these strengths versus working on improving areas of weaknesses is much more productive, self-rewarding, and ultimately successful.

Some have grouped StrengthsFinder into the area of self-help or lumped it with personality tests such as Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator.  It is definitely not a personality test and if you did want to categorize it as self-help, you will find it to be much, much better and more effective than any other self-help book or tool.  When I was approached by a colleague that went through the StrengthsFinder exercise and he express the passion that this is for real and fulfilling, I was convinced I had to give it a go.  So after I took the 30 minute survey and got my results, I quickly learned and understood better why I say, do, and act certain ways.  It helped me rationalize and focus my energies within the areas of my strengths so that I can help my team and the company become more successful.  This didn’t mean I wouldn’t ever work on improving my weaknesses, but it did help me recognize where I can use my strengths to overcome or disguise my weaknesses.

So, you are now asking, why does this have anything to do with Self-Organizing agile teams.  Well, soon after going through the exercise myself, Dave (my colleague mentioned above) implored me to have our whole product development team go through the survey – we did.  After everyone had their top five strengths, we compiled the list and posted it on our team wiki.  We all sat down and discussed what we learned about ourselves and reflected on the strengths of others.

At the time when we did this exercise, we were about ten months into using a Scrum agile methodology.   We had earlier delivered a huge product release and we were coming off a really tough period where everyone was getting burned out by the product launch, supporting new customers, and having some frustrating issues largely due to incomplete quality processes.   Soon after experiencing StrengthsFinder, we saw that the team which would normally “mouse-up” during difficult team discussions, would start leaning on each other strengths.  This helped me as the team lead, to simply sit back and let the team work through challenges that when previously encountered, the team would simply brush under the rug.  Going through StrengthsFinder seemed to give the entire team more confidence and it helped those team members that would often simply focus on trying to improve their weaknesses to instead, embrace their strengths and take on the tasks that best suit them.   Not only would they have more self-confidence, but they also embraced the strengths of their peers.  When we would start new feature or enhancement development, the team members often signed quickly and they would ask a fellow team member that may have been stronger in another area to assist (e.g. using a person that has the Relator strength to interview subject matter experts).

Within two months after working through StregnthsFinders, we experienced measurable quality improvements and we moved closer to a self-organizing team where anyone on the team could lead within their strengths.

So if you are working within an Agile team and you are struggling with the “self-organizing” aspects or your team has hit a continuous improvement plateau, give Clifton StrengthsFinder 2.0 a try.  The books required can be obtained for less than $13 at Amazon or Borders.