Agile Coaches' Corner Real vs. Fake Teams with Eric Landes
This week, Dan Neumann is joined by AgileThought colleague, Eric Landes, to discuss real vs. fake teams! Landes, who comes from a DevOps background, originally started out as a developer. Currently, he serves as a Senior DevOps Consultant, ALM Director, and Solutions Architect. In his roles, he helps clients deliver value to customers in their software delivery pipeline, and has extensive experience in leading organizations in adopting agile and lean frameworks, like Scrum and Kanban.
In today’s discussion about real vs. fake teams, Dan and Eric talk about what distinguishes between the two, the benefits to having a real team vs. a fake one, and how you can help enable teams to move from ‘fake’ to real. Tune in to hear it all!
Key Takeaways
What distinguishes a real team vs. a fake team?
Real teams collaborate while fake teams cooperate
Fake teams are groups of individuals that are not behaving together and do not have a shared goal or outcome
Real teams have a collective focus, they are catching defects before they happen, and there are code reviews happening in real-time
Fake teams observe rather than code in real-time (so they end up with really delayed feedback)
Fake teams generally have lots of individuals, working on lots of different problems at the same time (therefore, they’re not really building on each other’s ideas)
Real teams have an interest in continuously improving together, whereas fake teams may have a rockstar or two who go after self-improvement where the rest don’t
Benefits of having a real team:
Faster delivery pattern with higher quality
A real team collaborates and keeps the whole team’s focus in check
It’s a lot more energizing than working in isolation
Benefits of quality and speed and delivery
The focus from the accountability you get from being on a team helps eliminate brain distraction
Happier employees
How to enable teams to move from “fake” to real:
Making coding katas or dojos a regular thing for the team
If you’re management and the team wants to hone their craft, help enable that
Defining the goals for real collaboration beforehand with your team can help enable more effective collaboration
Does the team have a goal that makes sense for them? If they don’t, then start there in establishing one
When you do have a goal for the team, look at the product backlog and make sure it is structured in a way that enables collaboration
In the retrospective, help the team see some things that might be opportunities for improvement that would encourage a collaborative focus
Mentioned in this Episode:
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts, by Annie Duke
Eric Landes’ Book Picks:
Training from the Back of the Room!, by Sharon L. Bowman
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