Small is not always beautiful

Small, cross-functional teams are the essence of agility. Many organizations are now experimenting with or reorganizing around multi-skilled product teams, or Spotify-style ‘squads’ and ‘tribes’, often with fantastic results. But the transition is not always easy. In this post, I summarise some of my experience of what to look for to avoid problems and how to keep small beautiful.

Photo credit: Paul Papadimitriou (Flickr CC)

‘The essence of Scrum is a small team of people.’ So say Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland in The Scrum Guide™. The benefits of small, cross-functional teams are well known. I recently saw a presentation by a team from a large online retailer, in which they described the benefits of introducing small product-aligned teams in their business: after the creation of these teams, they increased the number of features and value delivered by more than 30pc, while reducing delivery time by over 60pc. Other organizations tell similar stories of success.

Working in a small, empowered, do-everything team is a great experience for people. According to the 2018 State of Agile report, 61pc of organizations reported increase in team morale among the benefits of their agile adoptions.

But unfortunately, sometimes the experience is a negative one: the teams fail to norm and perform well together, and they don’t achieve the expected levels of productivity, speed to market, product quality and business value.

I have seen this several times now in large established organizations. Sadly, this is how things sometimes play out:

• The organization is unable or unwilling to grant the teams proper accountability and autonomy
• The organization fails to define leadership and roles in the team
• The teams lack a clear focus on their objectives, and therefore they spend time looking for clarification from leadership, and/or they descend into internal bickering about priorities
• Team members bring with them the mindset and culture of their silos, which are often mismatched, and this feeds the conflict
• In the vacuum of strategy, objectives and accountability, team members compete for authority and primacy in the team, and some may exploit the situation to progress their own agendas, while others create comfort zones
• Good people soon start to leave the team, either to escape the toxicity of the situation, or out of frustration over lack of progress, productive work and learning opportunities
• The team delivers poor quality work which is of little business value
• The organization quietly abandons its experiment and reaffirms its belief in its functional silo-based organization design.

Setting up such teams without giving them direction, setting expectations, or providing support, will often fail to realize the expected business benefits. It may also create demotivating, unhealthy and psychologically unsafe environments, and disengagement and turnover of staff. As Schwaber and Sutherland point out, ‘Scrum makes clear the relative efficacy of your product management and work techniques.’ Likewise, creating small cross-functional teams makes clear the misalignment of business units, and differences in management style and culture, as well as the conflicts, politics, poor performance and unprofessional behaviours, prevalent in silo organizations.

Organizations often do not appreciate the work they need to do to make a success of small agile teams. There is so much more to do than simply putting people together in a collocated working space:

• Organizations need first to identify the value streams, product/service lines, market segments, and strategic objectives
• Form teams accordingly, and make them accountable for defined value propositions and product lines (and if you are not prepared to make them fully accountable, stop at this point)
• The teams need to be autonomous as well as accountable – this means the teams must be allowed to be self-organizing, and to plan and execute and demonstrate progress without having to go outside the flow of the work for direction and approval
• Teams need to be supported to be successful with their chosen frameworks and methods, through training and coaching, and others in the organization need to be educated to comprehend the teams’ methods and be able to interact with them productively
• The organization must adopt a discovery mindset – nothing perfect or beautiful was ever created at the first attempt, and both teams and execs must be enabled to reflect on and improve their performance incrementally.

It is not enough just to collocate people and leave them to get on with it.