What is an Agile Team?
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Great agile teams are essential in environments where requirements are unpredictable and change is both frequent and fast. Agile is built upon the premise that, in those situations, the best placed people to work out what to do are those tackling the problems and implementing the solutions – the agile team.
This team will not be fed requirements but rather allowed to iteratively solve problems through creativity, collaboration and feedback.
What is a Scrum team?
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Scrum Teams are cross-functional, meaning the members have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint. They are also self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how.
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The Scrum Guide
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Agile Team Maturity
All great teams define their own destiny
Every team is unique and will first of all determine their own identity and definition of greatness. They will work through how they will all contribute to the team’s goals and growth then decide how to become the best team they can be. They will set their own bar and constantly work towards it, achieving milestones of greatness along the way.
Become a great Agile Team
The great agile teams I have seen develop themselves into a SQUAD:
- Self-Improvement: They are relentless about getting better at what they do and how they do itr
- Quality: They take pride in their work
- Unity: They are stronger together than they all are individually
- Audacity: They take the autonomy offered to them and bravely manage themselves
- Delivery: Getting valuable, tangible work done is their ultimate goal
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The Team Mastery Pathway helps your team identify their own definition of greatness to which they aspire and gives them the tools to chart their own path towards it, inspecting and adapting along the way.
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Geoff Watts
Let's Turn Your Teams Into Great SQUADs
Frequently asked questions
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Can we define topics up front?
In short, yes. We have cohorts who effectively create a Navigator Backlog that they keep up to date and prioritise so the Guide can come prepared with exercises, activities and tools to elaborate on certain topics.
We sometimes identify a couple of extra topics that the sponsors or delegates are already aware of that are outside of the learning objectives of the Explorer and Adventurer workshops. There’s no reason why we can’t build those in to the Navigator Sessions in advance before signing off on the Pathway.
If in doubt get in touch with one or more of our Licensed Guides to discuss this more.
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What's the value of the Navigator sessions?
There are a few benefits to leaving this proportion of the Pathway undefined:
It is emergent learning. As mentioned already, our Guides are experienced practitioners and coaches as well as trainers who can react to the unpredictable and provide real value in the moment.
It helps establish habit. A huge part of the philosophy of our Pathway approach is to help our learners get into a habit of continual learning, application and reflection. By having a Navigator session every 1-4 weeks helps establish a ritual and after a while this becomes an unconscious habit of continual improvement.
It is pull-based. Agile approaches are more “pull-based” than “push-based”. We tend to pull what we need when we need it (features, materials, stories, learning) rather than predict what we will need in advance.
It spreads out the learning. As well as allowing for reflection on previous learning it avoids learning overload by spreading it out over time.
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When are the Navigator Sessions?
This can be flexibly agreed with your Licensed Guide and each cohort can decide on a different approach based on their circumstances. Ultimately though there are 15 hours worth of coaching sessions that can be used. Most cohorts tend to have one session per month and may even spread them out over longer than six months. Some go for fortnightly sessions.
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What kind of topics get covered in Navigator sessions?
Some topics are quite easy to predict in a way because some topics stand out as more important than others in the Explorer Workshop. It almost becomes inevitable then that we use a Navigator Session to explore that in more depth or detail.
Other topics emerge that sometimes surprise me. We’ve run Navigator Sessions on the following (these are not exhaustive):
- Team conflict
- Stakeholder influencing (specific individuals and groups)
- Estimating and planning techniques
- Recruiting a new team member
- Customer surveys
- Specific coaching models
- Value stream mapping
- Presentation skills
- Impostor syndrome
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What are the Navigator Sessions
The Navigator Sessions are a set of unscripted sessions built in along the Pathway where we don’t push content at you but rather meet you where you are and coach you on the specific challenges you have been tackling or are about to tackle in your unique agile transformation.
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