Stable Teams w/ Tim Wise

LeadingAgile' Tim Wise spent some time talking with Dave Prior about how important stable teams are to making Agile work. Tim and Dave also discuss the impact of not having them and what you can do about it. Show Notes 00:08 Interview Start and Tim introduction 00:53 - Topic Introduction - Why you need stable teams to make Agile work 02:03 - Tim explains what stable teams are and why they are important 04:51 - Dave presents a common argument against stable teams 05:30 - An example of an organization being successful without stable teams 07:12 - How Digital Agencies struggle with Agile due to a lack of stable teams 07:35 - Why are we advocating for stable teams? What’s the reason behind it? 08:08 - Why you need stable teams to be predictable 08:30 - Research about teams and making them work 10:08 - Shouldn’t really skilled professionals just be able to work together? ( Studio Musicians vs. Professional Athletes) 12:33 - Packing your team with all “A” players does not make a great team 13:18 - Google’s Search for Perfect Teams 14:00 - Establishing Team Norms and a Shared Purpose 15:01 - Why great teams are able to be flexible and cope with change 15:28 - Trusting the skills and abilities of your fellow team members 15:52 - How trust enables greater focus 16:48 - Diverse Collective Intelligence and Self Organization 18:09 - How a team exploits their own conditions and uses their own capabilities to get the most out of each other. 19:49 - Teams spread across multiple projects have lower throughput that teams working with a single focus 21:29 - Team stability metrics and collecting data on team performance that can be used to identify hot spots in the organization that can be addressed 23:05 - What if you don’t/can’t have stable teams? What should you do in order to still get value out of Agile 23:47 - Advice for Digital Agencies that lack stable teams 25:53 - Understanding the cost of making the choice to not have stable teams 27:08 - Making the choice for stable teams and one backlog (regardless of the number of projects) 29:44 - Running a test to prove stable teams work 30:28 - How to reach Tim for more information What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html The Atlanta Scrum User Group https://www.meetup.com/agile-38/ Here is where you can reach Tim: LeadingAgile http://www.leadingagile.com/guides/tim-wise/ WiseAgile http://www.wiseagile.com Tim on Twitter https://twitter.com/timswise Tim on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/timwise