When Agile Teams Need Help

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Agile   Talent Management   Teams   ProjectsAtWork  

Agile teams are typically small and ideally stay intact, improving as they bond. But sometimes specific expertise needs to be brought on board. There are several valid reasons to do this but also downsides, from dependency to disruption. Here are three steps to mitigate the risk of adding an "outsider" to your Agile team.

The way Agile teams are meant to be constructed involves gathering a relatively small group of folks who collectively have all the required skills; giving them a product and a set of goals; and then letting them go off on their own.

The best teams usually contain 10 or fewer members, including developers, product owners and other roles. Keeping the team this size allows the team to bond — both as individuals and as a unit — and to learn each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Keeping an Agile team together will often lead to greater and greater performance as time passes and the team gains experience working with each other.

However, adding one new member to a team can set it all the way back to the start, causing the team dynamic to completely reform. For this reason, the team ideally should be able to handle all the needs of the project on their own. Unfortunately, this isn’t always practical.

All teams have “core” members; that is, people who stay with the team from start to finish, and do the same work as …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.