Explore The Agile Team Effectiveness Model With Your Team

Last week, my good friend Carsten Grønbjerg Lützen offered me the opportunity to facilitate a workshop for LEGO’s Creative Play Lab in Billund, Denmark. Even better, he booked a space in the Idea House. This is where it all started for LEGO! Check this blog post for more details about the LEGO Idea House.

While enjoying a sunny walk towards the Idea House, I thought of a simple workshop format to familiarize Carsten’s colleague with the Agile Team Effectiveness model. It turned out to be a valuable session and worth repeating.

In this blog post, I’ll share the flow, steps, and invitations I used. Obviously, it involves Liberating Structures.

How To Prepare?

For each participant, print A4-sized copies of:

• Agile Team Effectiveness Model
• Agile Team Effectiveness Findings
• What, So What, Now What?

Ideally, you also have these illustrations available as a large poster.

Step 1 — Impromptu Networking

The Liberating Structure “Impromptu Networking” allows a group of any size to form personal connections and share ideas in less than 20 minutes. It invites everyone to participate from the very start and share stories, challenges, or experiences with each other. Not only is it an excellent way to ‘break the ice,’ but it also cleverly uses the collective brainpower of the group to identify patterns rapidly.

To start, distribute copies of the Agile Team Effectiveness Model. Clarify that you won’t explain the model up front. The purpose of this first exercise is to allow the participants to make sense of the model themselves.

• Five rounds in total
• Each round in a different pair
• Each round focuses on a new question

The questions are:

What factor seems important?

What factor do you consider challenging?

For what factor do you see a big opportunity?

What factor needs a courageous conversation?

What factors are connected?

Step 2 — Explain The Model

Next, take 10 minutes to explain the Agile Team Effectiveness model. Ideally, you’ve already studied the academic paper or the non-technical version to describe the model in your own words.

About the Agile Team Effectiveness Model

How can you make Agile teams more effective? While opinions are easy to find, finding evidence-based recommendations is much more challenging. Unfortunately, scientific research in this area is limited. So, we perform this research with academics, statisticians, and psychologists. We publish our results and data through peer-reviewed scientific journals to contribute to robust knowledge.

For seven years, Christiaan Verwijs and Daniel Russo performed case studies and gathered data from over 5.000 Agile teams to develop a scientific model for Agile Team Effectiveness. They published a peer-reviewed scientific paper in the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) academic journal.

Our model provides direction on assessing, diagnosing, and supporting Agile teams. It shows which areas are well-developed in teams and which need work. Our model offers a focus in a world where you often have thousands of options, approaches, and methods. We use the data to give you evidence-based suggestions on what to improve.

To learn more, check the academic paper or read the non-technical version in the blog post “What Makes Agile & Scrum Teams Effective?”

Step 3️ — What, So What, Now What?

The Liberating Structure “What, So What, Now What?” helps by asking us to reconsider what is happening. It structures our thinking by breaking our experience into three steps: “What do we notice?” “So, what does this mean?” and “Now, where do we go from here?” It takes inspiration from the Ladder of Inference by Chris Argyris, an expert on learning in organizations.

Give everyone a copy of the “What, So What, Now What?” worksheet. Ask them to consider their team when reflecting on the various questions or the team they work closest with. Set the expectation that the purpose is to become familiar with the Agile Team Effectiveness model, not to do a deep diagnosis of the team.

Each round starts with 1 minute of individual reflection. Next, invite everyone to share their findings and ideas with someone else. After a few minutes, everyone writes down their answers on the worksheet.

Round 1: What?

“When thinking about (the results of) our team(s), what facts and observations stand out? What are typical things you see, hear, and notice in your team?

For example:

• “Why can’t we already release this iteration?”
• “I love working with our stakeholders.”
• “What is the value of this work item?”

Round 2: So What?

“Given your observations, what conclusions can you make? So, what factors from the Agile Team Effectiveness model seem important to invest time in?”

In the examples I shared, this would be:

• Release Frequency
• Stakeholder Collaboration
• Value Focus

Round 3: Now What?

“Now, what small actions can you identify to start improving on the factors that matter most?”

Invite everyone to identify one improvement (15% Solution) for one of the factors. Work together to refine the improvements and make them more specific and actionable.

As an example, potential improvements could be:

• Release Frequency: “Pledge to release at least two times this Sprint/iteration. Treat this as a constraint to spur creativity. Before you start with an item, think about how to release it individually.”
• Stakeholder Collaboration: “Create a desk in your team space, and invite one of your stakeholders to use it for the upcoming Sprint.”
• Value Focus: “Share your Product Backlog with at least 3 stakeholders, and ask them what items they consider the least valuable. Remove the items you can’t explain either.”

Step 4 — Introduce Columinity

By now, the team is familiar with the Agile Team Effectiveness model and has experienced how it can help them improve. Next, explain that it’s integrated into a product called Columinity. A product to help teams (and organizations) improve based on scientific insights! You can diagnose one or many teams, receive evidence-based feedback, and resolve broader organizational issues.

Why don’t you try this format during your next retrospective?

Closing Words: What’s Keeping You?

From experience, we know how hard it can be to drive continuous improvement in your team. There are often a thousand things to improve, but what will be most impactful? We are building Columinity to make this easier for you and your team. It’s free for individual teams. So give it a try and expand from there!

PS: for more inspiration, check the blog post “10 Retrospective Formats Based On The Agile Team Effectiveness Model.”