Agility for Non-Product Teams and Workgroups

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile  

We know a lot about how to help product-focused teams use agility. Those teams can plan for a little bit, collaborate, deliver, and learn from their work.

But what about non-product teams? What if you’re part of the project portfolio team? Or you work in a workgroup (such as Marketing), or a dynamic team (such as a sales team)? What can you do to exhibit more agility? You can support those teams to be more agile, and that support doesn’t look much like a product-focused team.

Product-focused teams create a culture of agility with these ideas:

• Plan a little for the product, say for the next week or so. (I happen to like right-sizing work and using cycle time, so we don’t have to estimate or forecast much.)
• Collaborate as a team to finish that work and release the product.
• Get feedback—from customers, colleagues, and the team itself—about that work and the process the team used.

Product-focused teams continue to work in a regular cadence as they create and refine the product. But non-product teams and workgroups often deliver decisions or information, not a product.

Let’s start with how non-product teams differ from product-focused teams.

Examine your team type by delivery
Lucy, a member of the project portfolio team, represents her function, Finance. The team has plenty of projects it wants the IT teams to deliver …

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