Topic Teasers Vol. 1: Expanding Agile Teams

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  Agile  

My organization has one successful agile team, but we need to expand to more teams. How can we add more teams, but keep the way we do things consistent?

A. Divide your successful team and place one person in each of the new teams you want to adopt agile.

B. One agile team is enough for any organization. Leave your other teams using their previous techniques.

C. Slow down and bring one or two new people into your existing team to learn, then split the teams.

D. Run an agile camp on the weekends for six weeks and have the successful team train the new people.

Answer: B. Slow down and bring one or two new people into your existing team to learn, then split the teams.

Once an organization gets a taste of the business value that they can get from an agile team, they often want to expand the practices to other teams. Logically, at least plotting out teams with “Xs”on paper, it seems obvious that the answer is to just split the team and have each of the five or six members go into another team and “teach” them agile practices. However, in reality, this seldom is a successful way to expand teams.

There are two big flaws with this approach. First, live people seldom perform like the “Xs” in your diagrams. When inserted into a new standing team, it is more likely that the formerly agile person will be absorbed back into …

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