agile-team-development

Team-Start Example

Purpose

Time required

Start with at least one day 9-16

There is more material than that, make plans on how to cover the rest either as a day 2 or as several more smaller sessions

Preparations

Agenda

Connect

The purpose of the “connect” session is

We want this to start right away in the morning to avoid people settling into “listening mode”. Thus: Keep your welcomes etc very short (< 1 minute!) and get started with some connect activities almost immediately. Pairwise activities are best since then everyone needs to participate

Example:

Hi, welcome to this day with our team! We have prepared a lot of interesting exercises and I hope you all will find this both useful and fun for our team! Before we get into the agenda etc in a few minute, I would like us all to get started with some warm-up activities.

Let them talk for 5 minutes and then collect some answers. It will be a mix on actions to take how to achieve greatness and how to actually see that greatness have been achieved.

Never mind! Show the the definition from Richard Hackman and ask them to compare with their own discussions:

Ok, what we will work on today is designed to help us achieve this. Let’s look at the agenda:

Agenda

Ground Rules & Decision making

Time required, 5-15 min See separate facilitation guide

Psychological Safety

The Journey Lines exercise is a really good way to address this and other goals for new and old teams. Time required is about 2h, depending on team size.

For a team that has been working together, Appreciation Cards is another really nice way to start a session focused on team development. Time required is < 30 min.

Use both exercises, but perhaps not in the same session!

Product Goals

Time required, typically: 30 min - 2h

See separate facilitation guide

Organizational goals

Time required, typically: 30 min - 1h

See separate facilitation guide

Team-vision

Time required, typically 1h

See separate facilitation guide

Working agreements

Facilitate making a few team agreements on how to work together. Start with some individual reflections and then use “fist of five” to quickly refine some proposals and make consent decision. Document on a flipchart.

One working agreement that you probably want to explore with your team is how and when to work as individuals and how and when to work as a team. Check out the guide on ‘Balancing Team- and Individual work’ for a good way to do that.

Individual goals

Time required, typically 1,5h

See separate facilitation guide

A similar but slightly simpler exercise is “Market of Skills” Time required: 30-60 min See separate facilitation guide:

Team skills