Is a focus on team agility throwing your organisation off balance?
For the last two decades, the Agile movement has influenced how many organisations manage the delivery of their work. There is no doubt that the drive to adopt agile ways of working has had a transformative effect on the way people think about the nature of work and the best way to achieve a successful outcome. Two of the biggest gains have been in improving the transparency of work as it is being delivered, as well as placing more emphasis on seeking feedback from the people who will be impacted by the delivered outcomes.
The Agile Manifesto is recognised as the foundational statement of this movement and is accompanied by twelve principles, particularly relevant to the domain of software development. The eleventh principle provides guidance on how to organise people for successful agile delivery:
‘the best architectures, requirements and designs emerge from self-organising teams’.
The desire for autonomous, self-organising teams
It is a common perspective that successful agile delivery relies on creating teams that possess all the required skills and resources so they can operate in an autonomous, self-organising manner. If a team is able to harness all of its skills and resources to deliver the required outcomes, then it will be able to operate at a high level of agility. However, can a strong focus on team autonomy and self-reliance create a potential delivery weakness when organisations seek to achieve goals at the strategic level?
It is worth considering if an organisation’s focus on creating delivery agility through autonomous teams has underplayed the value of cross-team collaboration and enabling leadership in successfully achieving strategic goals.
The value of cross-team collaboration
In the absence of other motivators, teams will prefer work that:
minimises the team’s exposure to uncertainty
aligns with the team’s existing delivery capabilities
minimises the team’s dependence on the delivery efforts of other teams
would not negatively impact an assessment of the team’s delivery performance.
Cross-team collaboration provides the means to both explore delivery options and provide delivery support, beyond the capabilities of any one team. Sometimes the best work solution option will require a team to take on more delivery risk or shift its efforts to supporting others, while negatively impacting its own short-term delivery performance. It should not be expected for teams to override their own delivery performance concerns and pursue more collaborative work approaches unless there is a clear incentive or direction to do so.
Organisations will benefit from managing the delivery of all their teams as a combined ecosystem of capability. Work can be aligned to the strategic goals of the organisation and emphasis placed on the value of cross-team collaboration over individual team performance.
The value of enabling leadership
Working in teams unlocks the potential to combine diverse skills and experience to collectively solve problems. However, it is important to recognise that all teams have delivery limits, which at times can be challenged by the complexity and uncertainty of the work itself.
Leaders can assist teams to maintain a sense of direction and move forward with confidence even though solution ambiguity might remain high. This is not command and control leadership that directs teams by providing specific instructions on what solutions to deliver and how to create them. Rather, enabling leadership provides perspective to guide teams when answers to complex situations might benefit equally from lived experience and intuition, as much as analysis and established facts.
Creating an environment of enabling leadership helps teams connect their delivery purpose to wider organisational goals. Leadership insights inform teams on how to prioritise and focus their work efforts. Additionally, leaders can support teams to identify opportunities for collaboration and expand their solution perspective beyond their immediate concerns.
Optimise the whole
The adoption of agile methods has enabled organisations to unlock the delivery potential of its individual members by allowing them to operate in small, self-organising teams. However, when an organisation pursues its strategic goals it typically relies on the capabilities of multiple teams working together to make their achievement a reality.
The value of team autonomy needs to be considered in an environment that also promotes cross-team collaboration and the benefits conveyed by enabling leadership. This is not a contest of ideas but rather a balancing act to optimise the delivery outcomes of the whole organisation.
Readers interested in exploring delivery optimisation further may wish to consider the Forum framework and principles, which provide a way for teams and their leaders to work together to achieve their shared goals. Forum is free to use under a Creative Commons: Attribution - Share Alike 4.0 International Licence and can be found at www.advenio.com.au/forum.