Why measure or even concern yourself with whether you have a high-performance team? As long as your team is making progress, why does it matter?
This entire blog series is predicated on the fact that in most companies, there are very real budgets, resource constraints, and multiple competing objectives. If you work at one of the few places free from these real-work constraints, you are lucky.
If you have a high-performing team, that is a data point—just like revenue and budget are data points. More informed decisions can be made. For example, you may be considering where it is best to spend your time as a coach, how teams should be organized, or even how your whole company should be organized.
Understanding a team’s ability is essential to larger planning and budgeting exercises. High-performance teams give companies more options.
Definitions:
Story Points: In Agile methodologies, particularly Scrum, a “story point” is a unit used to estimate the amount of work required to implement a given story, feature, or piece of functionality. Story points are abstract measurements that allow development teams to understand the relative complexity of tasks compared to each other. [See WTF Is a Point for a detailed description of a story point.]
Going from Suck to Awesome
Suck – Underperforming teams that aren’t working together as a team. Sprints aren’t well planned, which doesn’t really matter because even when work is planned, it isn’t consistently getting done.
Sucks a little less – Teams that are either getting their work mostly completed but not as a team OR teams that are working as a team but aren’t getting their work completed consistently.
Awesome – Teams working as a team AND executing, evidenced by completing their work consistently.
Signs of a High-Performance Team
Some Attributes of a High-Performance Team
There are a lot of very structured, formal lists and discussions of what high-performance teams should look like. I work with many companies concurrently, and here are some observable attributes I pay attention to (your list may differ):
The team is able to plan their own Sprints even when the Product Owner or Scrum Master is out on vacation.
The team requires less and less detail for user stories. Less detail is required to execute work because the team members know what others need and are thinking because of cross-training, domain expertise, and a willingness to learn.
The team holds themselves accountable.
The team knows the largest point user story that fits into a Sprint, and the team has guidelines on how to ingest a story at that threshold.
The team is self-organized. There is a healthy, continuous improvement loop running. For example, maybe the team you are working with recently changed the statuses used in their scrum board. Six months later, they changed it again. Improvement is best when it is continuous and generated by the team.
The ability for Sprints to start and end on a predefined schedule—no matter what. This includes snowstorms, sick employees, excessive highway traffic jams, etc.
Team members can perform other roles without too much performance loss.
Low-stress environment. The team easily adapts to challenges without collective team stress.
High levels of participation from the team during the ceremonies.
Ceremonies are recorded because the level of trust within the team and company is very high.
Work is planned AND completed AND is aligned with the stakeholders, AND the work is providing value.
Over time, a team may even create its own criteria to measure itself against. Professional Agile coaches will have their own set of criteria. As teams start to improve, the improvements feed on themselves and make future iterative changes easier.
Many business non-profits, for-profits, branches of the military, and universities have studied high-performing teams in search of commonalities. Most of this work has been done (and continues to be done) outside of the Agile framework. A quick search online will yield tons of information on what they have in common. Here are some links to good and straightforward articles:
How to Leverage a High-Performance Team Across the Organization
Many organizations I work with have numerous teams within their organizations, so a single high-performing team is great but typically isn’t enough to make a difference by itself.
As I have moved from coaching a single team to coaching entire organizations, the problem of how to transform an entire organization is becoming my norm. I have struggled on this journey but have started to find a clearer path to success. Here are my current thoughts on the situation.
Working from the top down and getting executive buy-in sounds like a better approach than bottom up. So far, I haven’t had that luxury. That leaves working from the bottom up, which can definitely be a challenging journey.
When working from the bottom up, I try to find a single person in the company with the right attitude and aptitude. I spend extra time with them. From there, I seek a second person on the same team. This allows me to shift my coaching from a single person to the team. I continue to work with other teams, but for TEAM 0, I work with each person to ensure they understand the value of working within their team and the framework.
We double-check the user stories, we groom all the time, I answer any questions the team may have, etc. I try to tip the scales to ensure that Team 0 is successful.
Once the team is up and running and their continuous improvement loop is operational, I start grooming a single individual to splinter off from the team. Working with somebody who has gone from a low-performing team to a high-performing team (HPT) is invaluable because you no longer have to describe what an HPT feels like. They know because they have been on one.
Once you move them, making sure they’re aware in advance or, better yet, they ask for the opportunity to be moved, it won’t take long before they start replicating the habits of the original HPT. Migrating practices from the HPT has become second nature to this individual, and it is too painful to function within a team without using the methods they learned as their previous team became high-performing.
Concurrently, I have TEAM 0 invite other team members to observe their ceremonies. This serves two purposes. First, it gives TEAM 0 a sense of pride. Second, it allows other teams to see how TEAM 0 operates. This is aligned with transparency, which in and of itself may be foreign to other teams.
I then replicate the approach, team by team. Ultimately, I will add in some Agile Scaling framework. I always return to TEAM 0 to make sure they are still improving. If TEAM 0 degrades, you may have to start the whole process all over again.
As a coach, I also work with team members on TEAM 0 to make sure stakeholders are getting the data they need. This may be in the form of metrics or status. Stakeholders can be a big threat to the progress made if that progress isn’t understood and appreciated.
How to Continuously Measure High-Performance Teams to Ensure They Stay High-Performance
Even if a team becomes high-performing, that doesn’t mean they will stay high-performing. Here are some events that could derail a team’s high-performance standing.
Changing the Product Owner, Scrum Master, or even worse, downgrading to a project manager.
New management insists on switching from Sprints and Story Points to hour estimates and specific due dates.
New cost-cutting measures that reduce the size of the team.
Switching Agile management tools.
A reduction in force across the organization, which creates fear across the greater organization.
As always, these measurements are usually best when they originate from within the teams, but there are a couple of simple measurements that can be used to ensure the team is maintaining its performance, such as:
Velocity
Completing all the stories within the Sprint
Not injecting work
Well-received demos with key stakeholders
Other key metrics that can ensure performance can be found here: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/metrics
Conclusion
High-performance teams should not be rare. In fact, they should (and can) be the norm. Of course, there will always be the 1 in 100 truly amazing teams, but when working with any team, a primary goal should be to help them become high-performing.
After over 30 years of working with teams, I am constantly surprised by what can be accomplished. Even teams that start with nothing in their favor can grow and accomplish great feats.
Initially, I believed that for a team to be high-performing, it had to have a good percentage of highly skilled members. I no longer believe that. I have worked with teams comprised of members just starting their first jobs, where nobody could possibly be an expert, members didn’t know how to be Agile, and there was no support from the executive team. Despite all of these obstacles, they still became high-performing teams in less than six months! There’s no reason your team(s) couldn’t do the same.
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