This article is part of a series of articles covering my journey on improving teams in software development and non IT teams. It will show my learnings on team development, team maturity, the role of personality and cultural differences in teams.
Starting point
The starting point for this journey was when I started implementing agile principles, Scrum or Kanban in non IT teams. Non-IT teams can be business teams or operational teams delivering something different than software or reporting. Implementing Scrum in non IT teams by the book will not work. The context is different and not all agile processes will fit. This also means your team will not automatically benefit from the team best practices from you get out of the box from for example Scrum. Going back to the research Scrum was based on, learned me how find alternatives to get the same effect.
Team Research
Reading research toke me along interesting teams like astronauts, flight crews, bomber squads, CIA analysts and Special Ops Teams. The research covered most of the usual topics like:
- What is a team?
- Ideal size
- Team types
- Team stages
- Team and leadership
My focus was to find factors, frameworks and questionnaires that provide tangible results on what maturity a team has and what actions can be used to improve the team. In a way every team is unique but by using this assessment even issues that are below the surface can be made visible. This led to some surprises on teams proving to be very mature and teams who had serious issues.
Working with distributed teams spanning multiple time zones and cultures will have an impact on team maturity and performance. I will also share some valuable lessons I learned giving training in Bangalore this summer.
Series of articles
In this series I am taking a step back after using the assessment in 25 teams from a variety of clients and domains. This assessment was developed, inspected and adapted in the last 4 years. It will focus on:
- Team enabling conditions for success
- Team Maturity
- Personality and Team
- Cultural differences
Contact
Feel free to contact if you want more info on this series. Just sent me an direct message or email (info@doelenconsultancy.nl)
