A. People Factors (ex. Happy and Connected People)
B. Process and Tools (ex. Proven Policies and Procedures)
By reverse engineering thousands of completed software projects that had exact known costs, COCOMO model (stemmed from the term "Constructive Cost Model") found that seven factors had strong correlation on the final project cost.
The model proves that the impact of "People factors" is over 10 times more significant than "Processes and Tools" factors. This probably is the reason why Agile Manifesto preferred "Individuals and Interactions" over "Processes and Tools". Good People who have few / no processes can succeed even on difficult projects. Thus, we as leaders of the team may observe that most of our bandwidth goes in resolving issues relating to "People Factors". It is indeed right investment of leader's time...
Matured Leaders continuously nurture motivated and high performance teams.
Let us explore Leadership segment for a while. We often think that good leaders always need to exhibit "Supportive and Understanding" behaviour. Even, I as a practising people manager, I believed in this concept for number of years and started supporting my teams in what ever context my teams were in. I did not reap best results all the time through my "Supportive and Understanding Behaviour". By seeing my struggle, my the then manager asked me "Do you support your children all the while. Don't you try to be tough on your children at home just to make them tread on the right path?". This made me realise the importance of "Situational Leadership".
Situational Leadership says, we have to adopt different leadership styles at different stages of Team.
Team journeys through below stages
S1 (Stage-1): Forming phase (Just Formed)- Team just got formed or assigned to a project. In this stage, team members learn about each other once they are assigned. The role of agile leader is to directly help with project activities and present a clear, tactical picture of what needs to be done. Leader may also make lot of requests like "Help me see it?" or "Where is the problem?" to assist team members in "directing" list of activities to be performed.
S2 (Stage-2) Storming Phase (Challenge each other): In this phase, as team comes from different backgrounds/contexts, there is generally plenty of disagreement, open conflict and harsh dialogues. Agile leader needs to wear the hat of "Coaching" role to help resolve team members resolve conflicts without damaging the relationships. Let the disputes occur. but Leader acts as a referee to ensure that open conflicts does not go too far.
S3 (Stage-3) Norming Phase (Learn how to work with each other): In this phase, team has essentially created some "working agreements" and tries to learn how to work with each other. In this phase, the leader has to support the team to work better with each other. It is good time for the leader to challenge the team towards high level goals and establish accountability.
S4 (Stage-4) Performing phase: Performing teams are autonomous, empowered, self managing and self-policing. These are self-organised teams and self directing teams. They require little support and wants regular recognition and appreciation for their high performance. Leaders exhibit "Delegating" role in this phase, where leaders bring more "work and challenges" to the team to resolve. Reaching this phase is not easy.. Many teams never reach this phase also as we see frequent changes within the team. So we tend to go through Storming, Norming phases once again.
S-5 Stage-5 Adjourning Phase: This is the phase, team members leave the team. Sometimes, team members feel this part as complex to handle as they enshrined relationship working with each other. Leader and Team need to highlight the good contributions made by the outgoing team member. Leader may also wish to have one on one discussion with adjourning (outgoing) team member to indicate areas of improvement envisaging better future for the member.
Today's leaders does not want tell their members list of steps to be performed while achieving the iteration goals. They want their team members to be self-oganized and Self-directed.
Benefits: By allowing team members to self-organize themselves provide below benefits:
1. Enables us to use the individual complexity management skills we all have.
2. This recognition that the team member is in the best position to organize their work is liberating and motivating for the team members.
3. Delegating the responsibility for success to the team, allow them to do whatever is necessary to achieve the goals.
High Performance Teams are
1. Committed to common purpose, performance goals
2. With Complementary / Generalizing Skills
3. Small Teams
Characteristics of "Self-Organizing Teams": As per Lisa Adkinson, Self Organizing teams are
- They are self-organizing, rather than role-or-title based
- They are empowered to make decision
- They truly believe that as a team they can solve any problem
- They are committed to team success
- The team owns its decisions and commitments
- Trust vs fear or anger, motivates them
- They are conscious-driven, with full divergence and then convergence
- And they live in a world of constant constructive disagreement
Building High Performance / Self Organizing teams requires passionate coaching. Coaching is needed both at "Whole Team" Level and "Individual Level".
Coaching Teams at Whole Team level may involve below steps.
Coaching Teams at individual level may involve below goals
2. Guarantee Safety: Coaching Conversations to be kept confidential
3. Partner with Leaders: Partner with Functional Leaders to align everyone’s goals
4. Create Positive Regard: Develop a true compassion for others and a desire to help people improve in their roles.
Coaching at the Whole-Team and Individual Levels on Agile Space:
During Iteration planing and Iteration End, Coaching levels of "Whole-Team" is generally high. Where as individual coaching level reaches high during the mid of the iteration. Coaching both "Whole-team" Coaching & "Individual Coaching" can bring great results if it adopts Agile Fluency path.
Finally, great expeditions, notable contributions are usually done by "Self Organizing teams". Let us continuously nurture High Performance Teams...