April Meeting: Building Effective Agile Teams

Building effective agile development teams is a process that is larger than simply buying some fancy tables and co-locating a group of developers.

While building teams is not a “one-size-fits-all” process, this presentation will review core principles from motivational theory, psychology, and group dynamics that can be applied to forming, building, and scaling agile teams within your organization. Brian Watson will share his “from the field” experience as an Agile coach in building highly productive and efficient agile teams. Topics covered include: training, coaching, balancing business vs. technical needs, navigating the middle- management conundrum, and pairing.

Brian Watson is an Agile coach for VersionOne. He has over 16 years of experience providing Project Management, Business Analysis, and Agile coaching on small to enterprise level projects within a diverse set of industries.  Since 2005, Brian has led Agile transformations blending concepts of Scrum, XP and feature driven development (FDD) within consulting software development factories, utilities, workers compensation, and government agencies

When: April 12, 2012  (Second Thursday).
Networking: 5:30-6pm.
Program: 6-7:30pm.
Where: Max Training. 4900 Parkway Drive Suite 160 , Mason (Cincinnati), OH 45040

PMP's: This event counts for 1 (one) PDU

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Update on Tuesday, April 17, 2012 at 5:41PM by Agile Cincinnati

Meeting Epilogue

In April Brian Watson shared his experience on Building Effective Agile Teams with our community.

He drew a model to build agile teams in organizations; The pairing/transition process takes usually 3-5 sprints, once they grow their skills they are ready to code solo. Mistakes in this transition are part of the learning process.

It's important to keep the at least 10% of the team positive, knowledgeable and evangelizing the Agile concepts.

 

Management Support is key to the success of team. Mistakes will happen and part of the learning process.

Team spaces should be functional, doesn't have to be fancy. Elbow room for pairing and collaboration, dual monitors; remove walls, create a central locationg for card wall and stand-ups. Don't break the banks.

The team should be able to say "no" Encourage the team to take risks.

Continuity; only a small part of overall team success is "Agile". Team forms a bond and must be kept together.

Embrace the new culture. Work to convert pessimists; remove lack of understanding; think local and act global.

In our usual monthly drawing Amit Valsangkar is the lucky winner for the book from Pearson and Dan Rice got the tshirt from Atlassian. Thanks again to Versionone for sponsoring our food tonight.

Pearson book winner Amit Valsangkar

Atlassian T-shirt winner Dan Rice