Transforming the way of work to agile will be a one most effort consuming work your organization will take up. The team composition and roles need to be well thought out to ensure relatively smooth transformation. (The work anyway will be volatile enough!). Some of the key criterion to keep in mind while forming teams are
- Members who have influence – For a change that is all pervasive, it is important to choose stakeholders who can influence the change
- Members Who Are Excited – Having members who are excited about the change will make the initial part easier
- Diverse Skills Scrum is pervasive. So to adopt scrum we need changes in organizational process , technology , org structure , skill building – its essential to have people who can manage these diverse areas of impact
- Have a Sponsor – Choosing a sponsor who can not only influence but is also actively engaged with the team.He should be the leader who is engaged enough that he encourages others to be drive. Some of the most successful agile transformations have the sponsor as a product owner. This then ensures that his vision gets implemented.
- Consider Chapter teams – Chapter teams are the horizontal teams who take up a specific item on the backlog and then drive it through the organizations. They usually end up having a sub blog for their own area of improvement.We discussed this sub log structure in earlier post
- “Two in a Box Coach team” At times it is helpful to have a combination of coaches – Internal and External coaches working together. External coaches are able to bring outside perspective and they are in a better position to influence senior management in their capacity as “expert consultant” . At the same time, internal coaches are better able to understand pulse of organization and carve out action items that actually work 🙂