Transitional States of Long Running Agile Teams

Teams that start to use agile approaches and techniques for the first time seem to experience several transition states as their approaches mature and they begin to evolve from reactionary teams into proactive teams.

Below are some of the transitional states observed in over 10 teams over a 2 year period, typically in the finance sector.

Reactionary State

When existing teams first start out using agile for the first time they may inherit a backlog of past work items, new feature requests and bug fixes etc.

When they first start out they will be dealing with using new agile techniques and practices, learning how to think in a different way and working in a different way such as swarming behaviour or using self organising approaches for example.

In addition, there are usually a lot of customer requests being made and organisational demands on the team to start delivering items from the backlog. Often with a renewed expectation that the teams will improve their performance now that they know new tools and new agile ways of working.

As a result, it is not uncommon for teams to feel quite overwhelmed with a feeling of being on the "back foot". In this state they are reacting to customer and client requests, reacting to agile coaches or scrum masters, and reacting to themselves as they are trying to make sense of this sensory overload.

In this state, teams are reactionary and are only thinking of the short term as they scramble to meet the demands. During this state it is also common for a loss in confidence in the team, which is to be expected as part of the change, but also the feeling of being so overwhelmed by the additional expectations can take their toll.

Teams will tend to focus on their immediate priorities, work in quite a mechanical way and have a short term horizon as they are living a survival existence.

This state tends to last for about 6 months as the team begin to establish themselves and get ahead of the backlog. Typical activities tend to include tactical thinking with a short horizon of 1-3 sprints ahead.

Interactions with customers can be chaotic and ad-hoc often reacting to the recent stressor or tension point. It can feel that events are happening to you, rather than feeling in control of events.

In this state the team are preoccupied with building up their muscle memory and learn new agile techniques.

Incidents and issues are usually reacted to often with a high degree of stress and turbulence.

In this state the Tuckman's model of storming and forming seem to rage on as they discover who they are and how they can work together to handle the work at hand.

dealing with the known knowns in the backlog, with items being quite heavily defined and well understood.

The organisation tends to focus mainly on speeding up delivery

resistance

Attentive State

In this state the reactionary storm has passed and teams now begin to In this state, teams may have matured and proved themselves with some good consistency on how they do their work. The backlog is under control and may well beginning to diminish into a state where the team are beginning to wonder about downsizing.

In this state there is usually a calmness about how the team handle work and issues as they begin to build up their strategies to handle most eventualities.

The Tuckman's model of norming begins to be experienced as teams begin to reach a consistent flow state and the turbulence previously experienced begins to subside.

Interactions with the customer tend to be focussed on known unknowns where there is an awareness of what is needed and why, however the teams will look to learn new techniques such as solution definition techniques to uncover if they have the right solution

The organisation may well start to consider value to market over delivering fast realising that positive customer impact is more valuable than getting rubbish to market faster.

New skills are learned such as inception workshops, user journey mapping, customer experience and user experience synch up

cohesive

Proactive State

Tucman's model of performing In this state there is a marked transition as the team begin to learn about how to discover the unknown unknowns with rapid prototyping, Design Sprints, and low fidelity customer testing to try multiple ideas and gain data on which of those ideas resonate strongly.

An experimental approach begins to take shape as the teams begin to get used to trying new ideas.

Organisations in this state provide a safe environment in which the teams are enabled to experiment and discover the unknown unknowns.

The strategic thinking is with an evolutionary strategic direction that is constantly refined with customer and technical feedback.

The technical stack may well focus on efficiencies with a continuous improvement on automation

This state may also entertain market disruption and develop disruptive skillsets and build the confidence necessary to author new ideas into the market.

supportive flexible

References

1. Development Sequence In Small Groups, Tuckman B. W., Psychological Bulletin, Vol 63, No. 6, 384-399, 1965