Getting the team you need
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Continuing our theme of getting a team started off on the right foot, this post considers how to staff your team.
This month we continue our theme of getting a team started off on the right foot. If you recall, last month we looked at how a team picks a work process that is an appropriate fit for the work at hand. This month we’ll consider how to staff your team.
Every organization has its own way of staffing. Some have vast HR, recruiting, and staffing support groups. Others get by with a more organic, self-support model. Most fall somewhere between.
The bottom line is that no matter how your team is staffed, even if it is somehow the “perfect” fit for the job at hand, every team risks becoming an impediment to value creation if it falls out of sync with changing needs. Agile teams face change all the time. To avoid becoming an impediment, they must become learning teams and stay current on what is needed to address an evolving and dynamic work queue.
Feedback from customers, different states of a product’s life, new technologies all create needs for different skills, knowledge, experience, and motivations. Your team today may be inspired by the creative nature of a solving a new challenge. They would likely be bored with the daily routine of operations and maintenance work if the product experiences a stable phase during its lifecycle.
The key to staffing your team is to let the nature of the work inform who is needed. The items at the front of the queue are the ones that your team needs to address right now. The team you need is the team who can successfully compete these items.
As new items move to the front of the queue, the team must grow to be the team that is needed to complete them. Growth may take the form of improving upon what is already possible, learning new capabilities, acquiring new knowledge, and increasing, swapping, or even reducing staffing. Generally, these changes are evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
Failure to become the team that is needed results in the team itself being the impediment to optimizing value creation. The items at the front of the queue — those that are most valuable and most urgent to your customer — are blocked, and to make progress the team must turn to other lower value items that they are capable of completing. The lost opportunity of delivering the higher value items can be calculated as a “cost of delay.” This situation is never good.
The Agile Manifesto speaks of “self-organizing” teams and The Scrum Guide of “self-managing” teams. These principles and rules put the onus on the team itself to become the team they need to be. An empowered team must make the appropriate adjustments to get the right people at the right place at the right time to do the right thing. The rest of the organization must support them this endeavor for this self-staffing approach to work.
Getting the right team is the third "P" in the three P's of your project kickoff: Purpose, Process and People. Items routinely being blocked because your team can’t complete them is a clear signal that your current staffing process is broken. To solve this problem, first look to the team to identify their gaps. Challenge them to fix the gaps and invest in and, perhaps most important, support them in getting what they require to become the team they need to be.
