Recounting the times I have heard the word impossible in the last couple of months is easy for me. I can even tell the occasion and usually when it happens. Expanding ones horizon and not limiting yourself to established and understood modus operandi is often perceived as being impossible.
A scenario I am fairly familiar with. When I am asked to give our basic agile course, which covers an introduction to agile and Scrum, we sooner or later end up talking about agile teams. How they are compromised, what the key attributes are.
Agile teams have a few key attributes and for completeness’ sake, let me reiterate them here.
I entreat anyone seriously interested in agile team composition to understand them well.
- Responsible and committed
- Cross-functional with no roles
- Self-organizing
- Empowered to do whatever is needed to meet commitment
- Ideally sized to 7+/-2 members
The one bullet point from the list above which often triggers a muttered ‘impossible’ from the course participants is number two. Working with a team is hard enough, where individual commitment might not be recognised amidst the many contributors, but working in a team that has no roles and needs to organise themselves? Impossible!
There are many sagacious-sounding comments for or against this way of working, let us stop and rewind.
Looking closely at the current structure within organisation and the way we choose to run Human Resource departments we are able to descry that the current approach is detrimental to achieving truly agile team structures for a number of reasons.
Compensation as well as recognition and thus subsequently our career path are not necessarily tied to our skill set, but the roles we have operated in. Skill pools are usually less restricted than roles. A role expects us to fill only skill sets which are beneficial to the role. Skill pools can consist of many skill sets helping you to have many roles.
It is unlikely for someone to be hired into a director position unless he has held previous roles that would lead up to this new one. It is unlikely for someone to be paid more in a ‘role’ considered to be lower in hierarchical order than another.
Role based hiring introduces an inherent pressure to stick to those areas of expertise which are connected to the role. There is little chance for out of the box thinking and improvement on those skills. A simple example would be ‘I am paying you to be a Business Analyst. That is where your main skill is, do not waste my money by trying to help and test’.
Through specialisation we attempt to minimise the time spent completing a certain task. We derive this from sequential model thinking. I can only enter into completing task F after task E has been completed, so I naturally want the best woman or man or the job.
Most agile frameworks aim to improve output and the way we deliver by parallelisation of tasks. Having a task wait for completion is more 'expensive' than starting the task and maybe taking longer for it to complete as if the absolute expert had picked it up. Knowledge transfer and constant communication within the team will help to ensure that the quality level does not drop all too much. This is a frequently brought up argument and can be mostly handled by common sense and human nature.
We are professionals, we will know when something is too complicated and thus quality and completion time might be compromised too badly for us to pick up a task, rather than a subject matter expert. Cross –functional with no roles does not mean anarchy. It is a reminder to allow for out of the box thinking, creativity and knowledge transfer so that the overall structure of a team improves with every day on the job. It also serves as a reminder that we are only limited by our imagination and time. In any given organisation any of the members could do anyone’s job.
While highly unlikely because we are constraint by time and education, our brain does not limit us to only do what we are good at doing. There is always room for improvement and room to transfer our knowledge so that it resides in more places than only our brain.
Modern organisations keen on adopting agile through their structures will need to learn that resourcing and hierarchies have to change. Those companies will need to learn to adjust their compensation schemes and how they motivate their employees. Most likely moving from a very individually based recognitions scheme to a more team based one.
An open mind, cross-functionality, flat hierarchies and new ideas in human resourcing and company structures are all a “ceremonial appurtenance" needed to further develop agile and lean thinking. Nothing should be impossible once it becomes a passion.
For more information and another excellent post, please read The Wisdom of Teams - Generalizing Specialists