The Importance of Self-Organized Teams

Characteristics of Successful Agile Teams

Ranging from 5-9 members, Agile teams are typically small. Even outside of Agile, sizing of teams is recognized as a critical consideration to the success of any endeavor that requires collaboration. For instance, when researching what makes effective teams, Wharton Business School conducted a study across academic, sports, and business teams, and concluded that 6-7 is indeed an optimal group size for best performance.

Extending this further into the Agile world, not many people realize that our most popular framework, the ubiquitous Scrum, is based in part upon the academic paper “The New New Product Development Game," written by Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka.¹ In large part the resultant paper sought to collect and codify the most effective attributes of a collaborative team.

In an age when your daily wants and needs can be delivered by Amazon, we are a culture of instant gratification. This culture has bled into all walks of life, including our medicine. In June of 2018, Amazon bought PillPack out of Cambridge, MA, for $753 million to crack into the $500 billion dollar prescription market. With this acquisition, customers can get meds delivered to their door with automatic refills and 24/7 customer support.

This surge for speed and innovation is forcing large pharma companies to look at all their linear, traditional processes for inefficiencies. Most of these large companies are organized around functional excellence but not value and customer experience. Many are taking notice of other large organizations from different industries reorganizing around value to the customer and having wild success.

Eliassen’s Agile Practice, where we have 10 years of experience implementing Agile across large, global, complex organizations, held a virtual event with leaders from Novartis, Bristol Myers Squibb, UCB, and Vertex Pharmaceuticals. This was designed to bring together like-minded individuals who are looking to be change agents within their organization. We had our Agile Transformation Coach, Jim Damato, facilitate the meeting where attendees dot voted topics of discussion.

The Next Three Keys to Agile Transformation Success

Part 1 discusses the first three keys to success in an Agile Transformation:

1. Identify and establish expectations of transformation value with Sponsors / Executives
2. Establish and align with Sponsors’ objectives and key results (OKRs) for the next 90 days
3. Identify experienced Agile coaches to help define and implement the best way forward

We also encourage you to avoid the largest traps that Agile principles guide against — busy work. It is best to deliver value early. Define teams and transition them to scrum delivery as early as time permits. All else must be subordinated. An experienced Agile coach can start multiple teams to scrum without any enablement of pre-defined training or tools. They are dependent on leadership support to identify specific, dedicated, and willing people to work on the new Agile team. Often the largest challenge fits into the category of "change management." Emotional intelligence and stress management skills become paramount in the success of your transformation.

Assuming you have implemented keys 1, 2, and 3, you are ready for the next keys to a successful transformation.

Preparing for Your Virtual PI Planning Event

“Those who master large-scale software delivery will define the economic landscape of the 21st century.” Mik Kersten, author of Project to Product

Keys to Agile Transformation Success

The Executive job is to question results.  The investment based on trust and goodwill only goes so far. Without proactive alignment on how to measure success, those responsible for “implementing Agile” have the daunting responsibility to prove value, often with waterfall-like status reports showing outputs and not outcomes. Questioning the return on investment, executives have no choice but to throttle back, demand a reset, or worst case - cancel the initiative all together. Ironically, the simplest solution to this problem may be to use a few good practices of Agile to implement Agile.

Now, more than ever, teams are faced with figuring out the best ways to work from home without sacrificing efficiency, productivity, and most importantly, connectivity.

When I think about failing, I remember so many great quotes. There are a few that have stuck with me over the years:

“If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough.”

“Doing nothing is worse than failing.”

“The fast way to succeed is to double your failure rate.”

You might be thinking, ‘...is number three even a real quote?’ The answer is yes; the quote comes from Thomas J. Watson, the founder of IBM. My impression of this quote is that the faster we fail, the quicker we learn, the sooner we succeed. To that point, this means to learn to ride a bike, maybe even a backward bike, we must fall more often. To accelerate a team’s maturity for higher degrees of success, we can increase the speed and frequency of failure (e.g. Feedback). So how do we do that? We do that by creating shorter experiments.

What makes a great film? Does it feature the triumph of good over evil? Is it the drama? The horror? Maybe it makes you laugh, maybe it inspires you.

We live in a world of increasing regulatory constraint-
So how the heck can we make Agile work with compliance?

We live in a world of increasing regulatory constraint-
So how the heck can we make Agile work with compliance?

 In part one, we discovered that companies can lose their way through not being self-aware and reflective enough. That radical jump to ‘new ways’ is really a symptom of a greater challenge - something in the organization’s thinking has precluded an organic transition to the new way. We need to find the root cause, and that involves the next step - dropping the blame game and taking the power to organically learn and pivot back.

As an organizational transformation coach, my primary job is often to help people find what they’ve lost. It is typical to hear from executives and tenured employees alike that they used to be more aligned, focused, responsive to customers and the market, etc. But after I listen, understand, and empathize, I’ll usually ask ‘where did you lose it?’. As you might imagine, the typical response is a blank stare, and it isn’t surprising.

What do you typically do when you’ve lost something?

The impact of good design cannot be overstated. Design is everywhere. Everywhere. From the coffee pot you use first thing in the morning, to the car you drive to work, to your company’s website, to the atmosphere of a hospital waiting room. These things all required consideration of the user’s entire experience, the human experience, to be created. Historically, designers have occasionally been viewed as wistful creatives- slightly more sensible than full-on fine artists, but still on the opposite end of the career spectrum from an accountant, an archetype of “The Businessman.”

The traditional ideal of what a designer is isn’t entirely incorrect. The role of a designer incorporates understanding aesthetic and drawing from emotion. Translating these subjective experiences into an interactive solution requires an incredible amount of creativity.

But the truth is, the skillsets required of designers may have a much more prominent place in business than one might think.

We had the opportunity to discuss the value of design thinking with User Experience Subject Matter Expert & Design Leader, Rachael Acker.

At Eliassen Group, we’re proud to work in the strategic consulting and talent solutions industry. But what does "strategic consulting and talent solutions" mean? To some in the industry, it equates to putting “butts in seats,” and instead of seeing the faces of consultants, those folks see a row of dollar signs culminating in a bottom line.

Measuring Value & Outcomes

In Part 1 of this series, we discussed three primary metrics of an Agile transformation: value, flow, and quality, aligned with the roles of scrum: PO, SM, and Dev Team, respectively. While these may be considered geek metrics, they do eventually align with ultimate business performance when financials are available months or quarters later. Furthermore, they remain somewhat abstracted from the reasons why organizations choose to implement Agile (see the graph below.) In this article, we explore the value & outcomes category of metrics to holistically steer an organization.