Effective agile teams are self-organizing, cross-functional, and stable. The ideal agile team has 3-10 co-located members with different skills who report to a single product owner. However, real-world teams are often larger, distributed, and made up of multiple sub-teams. Scaling agile requires integrating work across distributed sub-teams through practices like Scrum of Scrums, shared code repositories, and release planning. Agile people management focuses on resource mobilization, career guidance, and servant leadership to create autonomous, adaptive, accountable teams that have fun and get the job done.

1. Effective Agile Teams

2. Self – Organizing Teams
“ Agile processes employ
self-organizing teams to
handle the complexity
inherent in systems
development projects. A
team of individuals is
formed. They organize
themselves into a team
in response to the
pressure of a deadline,
reminding me of the
saying, "Nothing focuses
the mind like a noose!"
(Schwaber 2001)

3. Key Characteristics of an Agile Team
• Whole, Self-Contained.
Does not require
external experts
• Generalizing Specialists.
Cross-functional
• Stable. Change your
mind! Do not change
the team!

4. Agile Teams Are…..
• Autonomous
• Adaptive
• Accountable
And they have loads of FUN
……………………..Well Almost Always

5. Team Composition

6. Agile Teams – The Core Supporting
Pattern
Technical Expert
Domain Expert
Independent Tester
Scrum Master
Team
Product Owner

7. Large Teams – Work within a universe
Operations
System
Integrators
Scrum Master Independent
PMO Team Quality
Product Owner Assurance
Enterprise
Architecture

9. The ‘Ideal’ Team
• Co-located
• Between 3 and 10 people
• Cross-functional, Self-Contained
• Reporting to a single Product Owner

10. The Realities
• In real world you work
with a larger eco-system
• Geographically dispersed
• Multiple Component
Teams

11. Scaling Scrum
Product Owner
Product Backlog
Team A Team B Team C Team D Team E

12. Scaling Scrum
Chief Product Owner
PO PO PO PO PO
Team A Team B Team C Team D Team E

13. Integration Management
• Product architecture identifying
interfaces and dependencies
• User stories explicitly recognizing
dependencies- Example new ordering Release Backlog
system should interface with X billing
system
Team A Team B Team C
• Synchronize iterations through
consolidated release planning
• Scrum of Scrums Continuous Integration
• Integration testing
13

14. Distributed teams
• Communication Technology –
video conferencing, chat tools
• Establish communities of practice, wiki,
blogs – shared knowledge
• Deploy local scrum masters – Scrum of scrums to
synchronize global teams
• Move from a verification based approach to a result
driven, value based approach 14

15. Scaling the Scrum Rituals
• Daily Scrum: Each team has a daily scrum. Updates posted
to common dashboard
• Iteration Planning: Shared understanding of highlevel
stories
• Each team does first level of planning. Joint review to
validate dependencies
• Release planning: Essential to get atleast all the scrum
masters and lead developers together. Rest of team on-
phone support
15

16. Collaborating across teams
• Distribute coherent set of
functionalities based on
location
• Each team has needed skills.
Self-sufficient and self-
organising
• Teams in different locations
work independently but
collaborate to coordinate
their work
16

17. Scaling Agile – Best practices
• Shared code repositories
• Wikis/ blogs to replace physical white boards
• Online communities of practice
• Disciplined approach to continuous integration. Plan for an
integration environment
• For complex projects allow for a follow-on end to end test
sprint
17

18. People Management

19. Agile People Management: Key Role
• Plan Staffing – Resource Mobilization
• Manage Staffing
• Guide Careers
• Plan Succession

20. Agile Resource Management
Challenges
• Recruiting specializing generalists
• Sensitizing HR to the Agile Culture. Less Reshuffle
• Agile is highly challenging. Only the most motivated
will stay on
• How do you fit in trainings, knowledge sharing sessions
• Half-baked Agile practices can cause dissatisfaction.
Watch Out!

21. Servant Leadership - The Invisible
Leaders
• Managers recede to the back-
ground
• Move away from allocating tasks
to people. Tasks choose people
• Team members decide who and
what
• Protect the team. Be the guiding
angel. Servant Leader

22. Secret Recipe for Great Teams
• Trust. Inspire trust. Promote trust among the team
• Communicate often. And without fear
• Make it a fun place. Decorated work places. Fancy titles.
Chief Imagination Officer, Managing Dreamer, Bug-Seeker
• Reward. Agile Stars. Badges of Honor.
• Nurture. Give everyone a pet project.
Guide careers. Promote growth
And the best team award goes to….

23. Thank You
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