2. Building a High-Performance Agile Project
Teams – Challenges and Best Practices
Rathinakumar Balasubramanian – Head - Agile Practice, Sabcons
3. Contents
1. Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... 4
2. Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 5
3. Agile Project Management ......................................................................................................... 5
3.1 Agile Projects - the need of the hour .................................................................................. 6
3.2 Agile Teams – A People and Performance Puzzle .......................................................... 6
3.3 What is a High-Performance Agile Team? ........................................................................ 7
3.4 Why High-Performance Agile Team? ................................................................................. 8
3.5 Building High-Performance Agile Teams – Challenges................................................... 9
3.6 Building Blocks of High-Performance Agile Teams ........................................................ 10
3.7 Building High-Performance Agile Teams – Best Practices ........................................... 12
4. Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 15
5. References................................................................................................................................. 15
6. Author‟s Profile: .......................................................................................................................... 16
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4. 1. Abstract
Objective and Scope: Managing projects has always been fraught with challenges such as
managing unclear scope, tight delivery schedule, growing customer expectations and paucity of
skilled resources. The software product innovation cycle is increasingly becoming shorter. Hence the
time-to-market has become the key differentiator between success and survival of an organization.
Perpetual beta is an accepted practice in product world due to always evolving project requirements.
Shorter time-to-market and always-evolving requirements have resulted in the rise of adoption of
Agile Methodologies.
But adopting agile methodology has never been easy, particularly for a team that has been following
traditional plan-driven methodology. Agile places a huge emphasis on people and the success of
agile projects largely depend on team performance. It is not an overstatement that agile team either
swims together or sinks together. Building a high-performance agile project team that deliver
consistent results is the greatest of the mysteries for many agile practitioners.
This paper solves the people puzzle by providing simple and practical ideas to build a high-
performance agile team. This paper
a) Establishes the need for a high-performance agile project team in agile projects.
b) Identifies challenges in building high-performance agile project teams.
c) Provides a pragmatic approach on how to build a high-performance agile project team,
overcoming the challenges.
d) Enumerates the role of the agile coach in building the high-performance agile team.
e) Explicates the role of the management and senior leadership in building the culture of high-
performance.
Area of Application: Agile Project Management, High-Performance Agile Teams, Leadership
Audience: Agile Project Managers, Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, Senior Management, PMOs who
are looking to leverage the high performance from Agile Teams..
Benefits: Project Managers/Agile Coaches/Scrum Masters can acknowledge the need for building
high-performance agile teams; they can implement the pragmatic ideas recommended in this paper to
build and sustain a high-performance agile teams leading to superlative business value generation.
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5. 2. Introduction
[1]
“The State of Agile Survey 2010”, conducted by VersionOne shows that the Agile adoption is
clearly on the rise. As per the survey, 90% of respondents worked in organizations that used Agile
development practices to some degree. The survey indicates that about half of projects in
respondents‟ companies use Agile methods. The hunt for global talents is reaching the stage of
pitched battles. Companies are ready to get the talent wherever it is available. With increasing
popularity of Agile practices, more and more companies are embracing Agile Methods. Each one of
those companies that embrace Agile, do it with a hope that agile teams will deliver faster results and
better quality.
Unfortunately, not many companies have seen the kind of high-performance delivery they hoped for
from their agile teams. Several agile teams have been a one hit wonders, while many other just could
not sustain their high-performance over a period of time. Building a high-performance agile project
team that deliver consistent results is one of the greatest of the mysteries that many organizations are
trying hard to unravel. Fortunately, there are organizations that have succeeded in their attempts to
do so. This paper “Building High-Performance Agile Teams – Challenges and Best Practices” tackles
the people and performance puzzle.
3. Agile Project Management
Agile Project Management refers to the software development principles and practices that adopt to
core agile tenets as prescribed in the Agile Manifesto.
[2]
Manifesto for Agile Software Development declares the priorities in the following way:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
Agile Manifesto clearly values the items on the first part of each statement more than the items on the
second part.
The most common agile methodologies are Scrum, Extreme Programming, Feature-Driven
Development, and Adaptive Software Development. Other methodologies like Scrum/XP hybrid,
Lean, Scrumban, AgileUP are also follow the agile principles and practices.
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6. 3.1 Agile Projects - the need of the hour
Current global business environment demands faster time to market to remain in competition. The
ability to respond to changes is a prerequisite to remain in business.
As per the survey, top 3 reasons for adopting agile are to:
1. Accelerate Time to Market
2. Enhance Ability to Manage Changing Priorities
3. Increase Productivity
87% of the respondents said implementing agile either improved or significantly improved their ability
to manage changing priorities. 70% of the respondents reported that Agile projects showed either
improved or significantly improved time to market. 66% of the respondents felt that Agile projects
were faster to completion than previous non-agile ones. 22% of respondents reported that they had
not experienced a failed agile project.
Agile practices address the changing needs of the business more than the traditional models.
Rapidly changing products features and crushed innovative cycles are a reality today. There seems
to be no better solution than Agile Projects and Agile Practices to these issues. In short, Agile is the
need of the hours and Agile is here to stay.
3.2 Agile Teams – A People and Performance Puzzle
Agile teams are ideally small in size. Optimal size for an agile team is 5 – 9 members. Agile teams are
co-located and prefer high-bandwidth face-to-face communication. They are cross-functional and self-
organizing in nature. They thrive under collaboration; do not have command-and-control. So it is
natural that agile teams are expected to deliver superlative results when compared to traditional
teams.
We wish the equation is so simple and straightforward. But, the reality seems to be different.
According to authors Michael C. Mankins and Richard Steele in their August 2005 Harvard Business
Review article titled “Turning Strategy into Great Performance”, the average team achieves only
63% of the objectives of their strategic plans. This means about 37% of the performance is lost
due to various reasons, as illustrated in Figure 1. When it comes to agile teams, they either achieve
superlative results or fail spectacularly. So agile teams are no better, than traditional teams and in
many cases they end up losing out in achieving the performance objectives. How can we solve this
puzzle which involves people and their performance?
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7. Figure-1 Average Team Performance Loss
3.3 What is a High-Performance Agile Team?
Let us begin with a broader definition of a high-performance agile team. “A high-performance agile
team is a self-organizing team that is empowered to take decisions in order to delivery committed
results. They thrive under trust and deliver business value consistently building high-quality products
at a sustainable phase.”
It is important to undersand the key aspects of the definiton as we proceed. So let us decipher the
definition by breaking it down.
Self-organizing team – High-performance agile teams are self-directed. There is no manager
who directs them what to do and how to do. Command and control is essentially non-existent.
They decide through consensus-building how the team will go about acheieving the results.
Empowered to take decision – High-performance agile teams have the autonomy to make the
necessary decisions in order to achived committed results. They are accountable to their
decisions and to their commitment as well. Agile teams are highly disciplined and responsible
in their behaviour.
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8. Thrive under trust – Trust is the core of high-performance agile teams. Without trust, there is
no open communication. Without open communication, no team can imagine achiveing
anyting worthwhile.
Deliver business value consistently – High-performance agile teams focus on delivering
business value to the customer. And they delivery it consistently. They are not one hit
wonders.
building high-quality products at a sustainable phase – Hallmark of a high-performance agile
team is the superior quality of their output. The team does not rush to deliver and will not burn
out due to mindless commitments.
Being part of a high-performance agile team is a dream come true for any team member. So is the
case for any leader in creating one.
3.4 Why High-Performance Agile Team?
There are clear benefits with high-performance agile teams. The benefits are so compelling that
organizations do realize that it is a game changer for them. As Patrick Lencioni put it “If you could get
all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any
[3]
market, against any competition, at any time.”
The key benefits are:
Enhanced commitment to delivering results – because the team members empowered to
make decisions.
Improved speed of delivery – teams that trust each other deliver at an incredible speed.
Superior quality product – because of intensive collaboration and the belongingness in what
they create.
Fostering creativity and innovation – as the teams are encouraged to collaborate and
cooperate rather than compete.
Greater satisfaction of team – raised motivation and morale of the employees in the
organization leading to lowest attrition rates.
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9. 3.5 Building High-Performance Agile Teams – Challenges
Lencioni Patrick in this hugely popular book „The Five Dysfunctions of a Team‟ lists 5 pitfalls of a team
namely absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment and avoidance of accountablity,
inattention to results.
When we look at the agile teams, the key challenges in building high-performance agile teams can fall
under 4 major categories. They are, as depicted in figure-2
1. Erosion of Trust
2. Lack of Ownership
3. Organization Culture
4. Fear of Conflict.
Figure-2 Challenges in building High-Performance Agile Teams
Erosion of Trust
Trust is the core of any team, be it agile or non-agile to achieve incredilble results. When the team
members trust each other, there is open commuication, feeling of safety and free flow of ideas. In a
low trust environment, communication gets blocked and progress slows down significantly. Trust
comes from respect. Agile teams respect everyone in the team. Respect is a values espoused by
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10. almost all Agile Methodoloiges – be it SCRUM or Extreme Programming (XP). An enviroment of
mistrust does not allow a the team work to blossom, let alone the high performance.
Lack of Ownership
In an agile team, lack of ownership is a serious problem. Agile teams are expected to be self-
organizing and therefore expected to own their decisions and their consequences. This could be due
to variety of reaons including team not having a vision, there is no buy-in from the team members for
the team goals and ducking the responsibility for the team‟s work. In ecssence, this boils down to the
fact that there are huge cracks in the team and team members are not willing to own up their
decisions.
Organization Culture
Organization culture play a major role in deciding how easy it is to build a high-performance agile
team. It is the responsibility of the senior management to provide a shared vison or purpose for the
team, in the absence of which high-performance is not possible. Organization culture that promote
competion among their employees will find it difficult to make high-performance team, as competition
kills collaboration and communication. Does organization culture actively support team goals and
team results ahead of individial goals and results across the board? If the answer is no, we are talking
about an impediment to high-performance teams. A culture of command and control or micro
management just does not help when it comes to make a team perform to their potential.
Fear of Conflict
Is conflict good or bad for a team? In general, conflict is good. An agile team including the agile coach
should operate from a view that conflicts are part of the life and they are good. Avoiding or fearing
conflict is not a solution. Avoiding conflicts – instead of confronting them with constructive
conversation is a sure sign of low performance team. Conflicts bring in diversity of views and
collective perspective to a problem. High-performance teams will not shun conflicts away.
3.6 Building Blocks of High-Performance Agile Teams
Let us look little deep into what makes a team a high-performance team. There are essentially two
dimensions that form the building blocks of a high-performance team.
1. Team Values :
Team values are non-negotiables that form the core of “being” a team. Key team values are
Respect, Openness and Courage. Any team to be a high-performance team should possess and
live the team values.
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11. Respect leads to trust; openness leads to collaboration and courage leads to diversity of views
which in turn feeds into trust and collaboration. All these values are required at all times. Without
these values in place, there is no trust in team, no collaboration in team, and no diversity of views
in team which means there is no chance of high-performance.
2. Operating Principles:
Operating principles are significant actions of the high-performance team that form the core of
“operating” as a team. Key operating principles include shared vision, trust, self-direction,
collaboration, learning to grow, team before self, and celebration.
Shared vision gives a purpose to the agile team to work with. For example, in an agile team, the
shared vision is to “deliver business value to customer by creating high-quality software”. This
binds the entire team and the whole team can now rally around this one vision or purpose.
Trust is fibre of the high-performance team. Speed and trust are directly connected. In a high trust
environment there can be a free flow of ideas, constructive criticism, and open communication
enabling continual improvement. In a low trust environment things slow down to a crawl.
Figure-3 Building Blocks of High-Performance Agile
Teams
Learning Culture is another principle that high-performance team operate with. Learning
culture refers to culture of continuous improvement. It is this principle that lifts the ordinary
team to a superlative team with high-performance. The best teams have an self-driven zeal
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12. for relentless improvement (kaizen) and look for any way to be more effective and efficient.
Iteration reviews and retrospectives (iteration, release and project) are classical tools or
opportunites in the hands of a high-performance agile teams.
High-performance team always remembers that team goals are ahead of individual goals.
This will ensure that there is no ego or unhealthy competition within the team that can
jeopardize the high-performance team environment.
High-performance agile team does remember to celebrate the success and they take pride in
what they accomplished. A high-performance agile team is a team of champions and
champions celebrate in style.
3.7 Building High-Performance Agile Teams – Best Practices
A pragmatic approach to overcome the challenges and help the agile teams to reach the high-
performance is to identify the factors that influcence the agile teams and then build best practices
around them. The influencing factors could be internal or external to the agile team and the factors
could be process-oriented or people-oriented. Now, we will get to see 4 major factors that influence
the high-performance of the agile teams.
Figure-4 Factors that Influence High-Performance Agile Teams
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13. Agile Team: The only people factor internal to the team that can influence the agile team is the team
itself. The „Team Value‟ and „Operating Principles‟ of the team are key to positively influence the high-
performance. Section 2.6 above covers this elaborately.
Agile Coach (or Scrum Master):Agile Coach or Scrum Master is part of the Agile team, however
may not involve in creating the product. But an agile coach‟s role is extremely crucial to an agile team.
As far as building the high performance teams is concerned, an agile coach‟s role is two-fold:
a) Be a Process Owner for the team and
b) Be a Servant Leader for the team.
a) Playing the role of a process owner refers to the duties of the agile coach in removing the
impediments for the team, ensure the agile process are in place and the team follows it without any
hurdles. Agile coach need to keep an eye on the operating principles of the agile team and help
them to build more evolved operating principles. Agile coach needs to assess if the team values
are in tact. Agile coach need to facilicate the planning meetings (iteration planning, daily stand-up,
etc.), review meetings, and particularly retrospectives effectively so that the team can drive
effortlessly in its journey towards high-performance.
b) Playing the role of a Servant Leader for the team is a great thing an agile coach can do. Being a
servant leader demands the agile coach first to be a servant to the team – carry water and food for
them. In reality, servant leadership role will exemplify the beginning of the path for high-
performance team. Without servant leadership, an agile team will face innumerable hurdles along
the way to reach the destination. How long an agile team would take to become a high-
performance team depends on how effectively the servant leadership is.
Senior Management:
Senior Management is external to the team but their involvement is the single-most factor to take the
high-performance team to the peak performance. Because in the absence of senior management‟s
active support, the team will get a message that they do not matter to the orgaization that much.
There are scores of literature aviailable in the leadership domain that explains the role of senior
management. From agile teams perspective, there are 2 good practices worth-reiterating here. They
are:
a) Recognize the agile team’s effort and
b) Be genuinly interested in the team.
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14. a) Nothing else will boost the morale of the team than a word of appreciation from the senior
management for the work done by the team. Recognition is a energy booster for the team which
confirms that the senior management does care for them. This will reaffirm their faith in the work
they do and will propel the performance to the newer heights. When it comes to rewards,
encourage the team rewards first, to send a message that team goals are above individual goals.
b) Senior management should take genuine interest to talk to the agile developers, testers, architects,
and coaches. Following 70-20-10 is a golden rule … 70% listening, 20% questioning and 10%
summarizing.
Enterprise Systems:
Yet another factor which is external to the team but mostly process-driven is the enterprise systems
that govern the employees of the organization. Enterprise systems – like performance evaluation,
Rewards system, Training and Developing (I prefer to call it “learning and growing”) system – are all
pervasive in any organization and can clearly spell out the intention of the senior management. All
the good work done by senior management will be undone if the enterprise systems do not walk the
management talk.
In a nut shell, Performance evaluation should promote collaboration rather than competition, Rewards
system should encourage team achievements rather than individial achievements, Learning and
growing should be part and parcel of the culture rather than an intermittant events.
Figure-5 Best Practices that build High-Performance Agile
Teams
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15. Figure- 5 summarizes the pragmatic approach – a set of best practices encampassing an agile team
to its journey to high-performance. It is imperative that all the four factors will have to go in tandem in
order to generate a superlative performance from an agile team. Though it may look like a tall order, it
is worth the hard work.
4. Conclusion
High-performance Agile Teams have something very unique. They turn the work into fun. It is always
a joy to work with such a team. It provides immeasurable satisfaction and sense of achievement that
cannot be unrivalled by another means in business. They are a delight for the customers too as they
customers can see the business value generated iteration after iteration in a sustainable pace. In
other words, it is a win-win for everyone in the game.
Building a high-performance agile team is not a destination; it is a journey that takes you through
exciting phases of building a world-class products. It is worth doing every moment of it.
5. References
Item Description
http://www.versionone.com/pdf/2010_state_of_agile_development_survey_results.p
1 df
2 www.agilemanifesto.org
„The Five Dysfunctions of a Team – A Leadership Fable‟ by Patrick
Lencionihttp://www.versionone.com/pdf/2010_state_of_agile_development_survey_r
3 esults.pdf
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16. 6. Author’s Profile:
Rathinakumar is an expert in agile project management
methodologies. He has more than 15 years of rich experience in
traditional and agile project management practices at
organizations like Infosys Ltd., Accelrys Software Solutions,
Valtech India. He has successfully managed large IT programs
and projects for Fortune 100 companies across USA, UK and
Singapore.
He has coached and trained hundreds of project management
practitioners in agile methodologies. His expertise includes
transforming project teams to agile delivery, building high-
performance agile teams, establishing agile processes,
managing agile product development, saving troubled projects,
and setting up PMO.
He has authored several whitepapers and presented insights on
agile project management to participants in various international
project management forums. As head of Agile Practice at
SABCONS, he is helping organizations to experience enterprise
agility.
Rathinakumar is a certified Project Management Professional
(PMP), PMI-ACP (PMI-Agile Certified Practitioner) and CSM
(Certified Scrum Master).
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