Working in an agile team

How does working in an agile team differ from working in a traditional team? Working in an agile team for the first time can be very challenging and you might rethink the way you work.

The first rule of forming an agile team is multidiscipline. An agile team should be able to do all the work, but not everybody in the team has to be able to perform all tasks. The second rule is a clear product vision and purpose; what needs to be build and maintained and why. And the third rule is: don't meddle. Let the team decide and give room for mistakes. Help the team get better and never punish.

Traditional roles are fading in a team. A programmer is learning to test, an operator is learning to code and a tester is learning to develop. All roles become less important and the knowledge is shared. Local heroes are replaced by team players; who support each other in getting the job done. 

One of the most important behaviors of an agile team is working in pairs. This makes sharing of knowledge possible, facilitates reviewing and saves time. While this sounds counter intuitive, results show that lead time and cycle time for changes drop significantly when people pair up. There is also a lower defect rate, less technical debt and more customer satisfaction.

Over time the roles are becoming responsibilities. A multidisciplinary team consists of engineers who are responsible for a part of the development and maintenance of a product. They are responsible for the piece of knowledge they bring to the team. They are expected to keep developing that knowledge and share it with the team and similar interest groups within the company. It is not really important anymore what exactly the job description of that person is. When they belong to the team, they become engineers that want to build excellent products and services for their customers.

An agile team is all about customer value. They engage in customer relations and find the best way to improve customer value. Work does not come from managers anymore but directly from customers. An agile team is not part of any project, it is part of an organisation that builds stuff for customers. In a big enterprise vision and goals (long term) are shared by leaders and teams use that to focus goals on a quarterly basis and in sprints. They organise the work they receive from customers around these goals.

Because an agile team is responsible for the work they do they are multi disciplinary, because they need to serve the customer best they have self autonomy and because they need to know where to go they need vision.