Agile Superpower #1: Focus on Collaborative Teamwork

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   Teams  

Agile teams have all kinds of ways to deliver value faster, both to verify that the team understands what the customer wants, and to verify that the product works the way everyone expects. The team can slice the stories smaller. Or, it can spike the work to create experiments and learn from them.

But every team has one powerful superpower at its disposal for faster value creation and delivery. That tool is collaboration. Not cooperation, although that helps. And not solo work, because that requires handoffs.

Collaboration occurs when the team members work together on one item at a time. When teams collaborate, they keep their WIP (work in progress) low and increase their throughput. (See What’s Taking So Long? Little’s Law Holds the Answer for more information.)

Teams have several collaboration options: working in pairs, triads, or subsets of the larger team; swarming over the work; and mobbing/ensemble product development.

Let’s start with pairs and triads.

How Pairs and Triads Can Work
Many teams still work in resource-efficiency thinking, where one person does “their” work, hands off that work to the next person, and so on. If you’re thinking this resembles the telephone game—you’re right.

When two people work together, they “pair.” Those two people—not a single person—take …

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