Traditional wisdom teaches us that long-lived, stable teams perform best, and that changing team membership is to be avoided as much as possible.
At Redgate Software we’ve challenged this advice, believing it was better for our engineers and the overall organisation to deliberately change-up our teams every year.
Our approach has been to encourage people to move towards the work they find most engaging, and this has helped us create a development culture of engagement, resilience and opportunity.
4. • When team composition changes
• Teams will always change:
• People leave and join teams
• People leave and join organizations
• Organizations create new teams, split teams, disband teams
• Change happens to us, but we can also choose to
change
5.
6.
7. • “Teams with stable membership perform better”
• “Keep your teams the same for predictability”
• “We don’t want to repeat the ‘forming, storming,
norming & performing’ pattern for each project”
10. “Groups that contain diverse
views have a huge, often
decisive, advantage.”
Matthew Syed, Rebel Ideas: The Power of
Diverse Thinking
11.
12. • Collective blindness and lack of Cognitive Diversity
• Experts stuck in teams
• Lack of opportunity to learn
• Siloed teams
• Lack of alignment and connectedness
13. “Team change is inevitable,
so we might as well get
good at it”
Heidi Helfand, Dynamic Reteaming:
The Art & Wisdom of Changing
Teams
14.
15.
16. Team members have
full freedom to move,
form or disband teams
when they choose
Someone “at the top”
has full control on
team membership
and lifecycle
17.
18. Team members have
full freedom to move,
form or disband teams
when they choose
Someone “at the top”
has full control on
team membership
and lifecycle
25. Explore Exploit Sustain Retire
Increase
Serviceable
Addressable
Market
Maximise Return
on Investment
Maximise Profit
Find Product
Market fit
26. • To change how we invest our teams each year
• To break down silos and encourage wider connectedness
• To spread knowledge, best practice and innovation
throughout the organisation
• To enable personal growth and development
• To align with our principles
27.
28. 1. Communicate early and openly
2. Encourage people to explore
3. Coach everyone through sharing their preferences
4. Collaboratively create the new team structure
5. Support new & changing teams
41. We track the four key metrics from Accelerate
and the State of DevOps report:
• Delivery lead time
• Deployment frequency
• Change fail percentage
• Mean time to restore (MTTR)
47. • Reteaming is an established, annual event
• We’ve proven that we can respond to the needs of the company
• People do want to move teams for personal growth
• We’re better at forming teams and onboarding new joiners
• Good practices and behaviours spread naturally between teams
• Our people support the process
• Positive for employer brand and hiring