Mark

Levison, CST
Agile Pain Relief

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 2

Scrum is a tool for building high-performance Teams. Some Scrum Teams achieve this
goal almost by magic, while others struggle to get there. So is it magic? Or luck? Or is it
far more attainable than that? There is a Science to it that makes it possible.

First, what makes a group a Team and not just a collection of individuals?

A Team is:
a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a
common purpose, set of performance goals, and approach for which they hold
themselves mutually accountable.1

Great, but high-performing Teams are different. They go beyond that, and they:
Focus on the goal. Its clear, frequently re-evaluated, and shared by all members.
Understand that the measure of the productivity is the output of the whole Team
and not the individuals. No divas. No goats.
Achieve significantly more as a Team than the individual members could on their
own, by implementing the science that well explain.
Have a high degree of trust among Team members.

Scrum requires two things to help create high-performing Teams:

Dedicated Team Membership Team members are part of one and only one
Team2. Dedicated Teams can work on multiple products, possibly even in the same
Sprint. What counts is that each Team member is dedicated to one Team.
Stable Teams Team members are part of one Team for the long term
(preferably years).

Stable, dedicated Teams are required because the real performance
improvements the so-called magic happens from strengthening the
relationships among the Team members, and not just from individual
productivity improvements.

The challenge is made worse since most Human Resource Departments focus only on
the individual skills development and not the growth of the Team.

1 Definition from Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith TITLE: The Discipline of Teams SOURCE:
Harvard Business Review. March-April 1993, 71(2):111-120
2 Scrum Teams can still work effectively if a single Team member, for example a UX expert, is shared with
another Team, but the Team itself acts as a consistent entity.

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 3

Five Key Elements

Form Stable Teams
Value Cohesion
Coach the Team
Watch Where You Placed the Water Cooler (No, seriously. Well explain.)
Help the Team Set Specific and Challenging Performance Goals

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 4

Form Stable Teams

In organizations that have a project focus,3 it is difficult to hold Teams together for the
long term. Thats the secret power of Scrum it challenges us to move from a Project
focus to a Team focus. So instead of creating and disbanding Teams with each project, a
practice that leaves much to be desired in efficiency, instead we create Teams on a
permanent basis and bring the work (projects or otherwise) to the Team.

Why put all this effort into forming stable Teams?
Because it takes time to get to high performance. The most popular model for
describing the process that Teams go through is Tuckmans Model of Team Formation:

High-Performance Teams take time to grow because they have to go through all of the
stages in Tuckmans model. From experience, the Teams take 6+ months to achieve high
performance, if theyre going to achieve at all.

Basketball is a sport that tests the performance of the Team, just as much as the
individual. Being a professional Team with a full time coaching staff, we would expect a
basketball Team to achieve high performance sooner than a typical software
development Team. So let's see how well that played out in a real life scenario.

In 2010, the Miami Heat decided to rebuild their Team around just one of their key
players, Dwayne Wade, along with signing Chris Bosh and LeBron James. Most of the

3 i.e. Forming a Team for a single project and disbanding them at the end of the project.

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 5

previous years starting players were dropped. By most measures the Team was new,
but with their resources and these players, they should have had everything they
needed to get through the process of Team formation fast.4

After a shaky start to the season, the Heat finished the year with a 58-24 record - their
third best in Team history. They went through the playoffs defeating top performing
Teams including the Chicago Bulls, who were the best Team in the NBA that season, and
third ranking Boston Celtics.

In the finals, they faced the Dallas Mavericks, against whom they should have had little
trouble. After all, the Mavericks were older and their individual statistics were weaker.
But the Mavericks Team had been together longer mostly unchanged from the
previous season and, to the surprise of many, the Mavericks won that 2010/2011
championship.

The next season, with most of the Team returning, the Miami Heat finally won the
trophy that eluded them the year before. So even in the sports world, with all of the
coaching and practice available to them, it still took time to grow a high-performing
Team, and the value of a long-term stable Team was demonstrated on the court and the
scoreboard.

On a high-performing Team, members know what to expect of each other who can
make the three point shots, where the ball will be placed when passed, etc. Its this
degree of knowledge and trust that allows Team members to focus on their part, instead
of looking over their shoulder waiting for a pass.

So what are the benefits of forming these stable Teams?
Consider these additional real life examples of where stability, or lack thereof, makes a
dramatic difference:
One orthopedic surgeon5 does knee replacement surgeries in 20 minutes (the
norm is one to two hours), completing 550 each year with better outcomes and
fewer complications. In addition, he has pioneered a number of techniques in his
field. He has two dedicated Teams in adjoining operating rooms, which include
nurses he has worked with for 18 years. He acknowledges that few of the
methods he pioneered would be possible without the familiarity of the people he
works with every day.
A National Transportation Safety Board Safety Study6 shows that 73% of
accidents happened on a flight crews first day together.
A Rally Study7 noted that stable Teams were up to 60% more productive, had
better Predictability (through reduced variation in throughput), and less time for
each item in Process.

4 Based on notes in: People Analytics Ben Waber and Wikipedia History of the Miami Heat (retrieved

Jan 16, 2014)

5 Source: The Hidden Benefits of Keeping Teams Together Robert Huckmann and Bradley Staats -

http://hbr.org/2013/12/the-hidden-benefits-of-keeping-Teams-intact/ar/pr (registration required)

6 A Review of Flight Crew Involved Major Accidents of Us Air Carriers, 1978 through 1990

http://libraryonline.erau.edu/online-full-text/ntsb/safety-studies/SS94-01.pdf
7 Larry Maccherone of Rally Software The Impact of Agile Quantified retrieved from

https://www.rallydev.com/resource/agile-performance-metrics-whitepaper

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 6

In a study at WiPro8- they found that as familiarity among Team members

increased, defects decreased, as did deviations from budget.

So it seems clear that, while it takes time to form and maintain dedicated stable Teams,
the benefits are significant. This is even more apparent in a Scrum environment.

8 Huckman, R., B. Staats, and D. Upton (2009), "Team Familiarity, Role Experience, and Performance:

Evidence from Indian Software Services," Management Science 55(1):85

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 7

Value Cohesion

This network exhibits good cohesion:

This one does not:

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 8

Cohesion is the action or fact of forming a united whole, and in Teams in particular,
cohesion is a state when its members possess bonds linking them to one another and
to the group as a whole.

In the network diagrams above, members are depicted by circles and the lines between
them represent the lines of communication/information flow. Thin lines represent
weak relationships or occasional information flow, and thicker lines represent stronger
flow.

In the first network (or Team), information flows freely among Team members. In the
second Team, information flows only through the controller. The second network isnt
collaborating, so important information isnt being widely shared. Because all
information flows through one person, that individual becomes a bottleneck for the flow
of information and knowledge and, therefore, productivity. In the first Team, most Team
members have at least two connections and often three. This means there is a number
of different routes that information can flow.

Networks with a high degree of cohesion build a high degree of trust because of the
constant stream of information exchanged.

Trust is built as people interact and make a series of small
commitments, and then meet them over a period of time.

Team members develop realistic gauges of what they can expect from each other, based
on shared history and open communication, and when those expectations are met, it
deepens the bond and trust even further. It eliminates the wasted energy of wondering
and worrying about what others will do.

Deep, rapid, and effective conversation can only happen when Team members have a
common background and shared language. For this to develop, they have to spend a
significant amount of time working together. The Team builds a shared language and
collective context over time, making extra explanation unnecessary and creating
instinctive language shortcuts, which leads to faster communication. Team members
also have a shared history, which they can easily refer back to.

Remember that thing that you did last time that worked?
Oh, right! We could try that again.

Weve all experienced this when we join a new company - the established people appear
to be speaking a language very different from the rest of the world. It takes 3-4 months
to grow that knowledge in a new Team member. This is part of the reason that newly
formed Teams take 6+ months to achieve high performance.

Other Benefits of Cohesion
In one study9, cohesion was 30 times more important than experience in
predicting productivity. The study was with call centre workers, not software

9 Pg 84 People Analytics Ben Waber refers to a Bank of America Call Center study

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 9

development Teams, but clearly cohesion is very important regardless of

industry.
In the same study, the sense of cohesion resulted in less workplace stress,
reducing burnout and fatigue and increasing Team retention and attendance.
News of personal issues spreads quickly. When a Team member is having a
down day (e.g. sick family member), peer support quickly identifies and reduces
any negative impact and helps return the Team members balance and
happiness.
Negative or destructive behaviour gets identified much sooner, since there are
always multiple sources of information. And when an inconsistency is spotted,
the information will spread around the Team quickly. As a result, people tend to
be more honest and positive from the start.

Weakness of Cohesive Teams
Cohesive networks also have one big weakness: their shared assumptions may be
invalid and not get challenged. RIM/Blackberry focused on hardware - building devices
that were faster, with great battery life, that always had a keyboard. They ignored the
consumer shift towards the importance of software and touch screens as the focus. The
failure to challenge shared assumptions on an ongoing basis nearly sunk the company.

Cohesion is critical, but needs to be offset by frequently seeking new ideas from outside
the Team.

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 10

Measuring Cohesion and Communication Patterns

Why measure cohesion?
To understand where the Team is weak and needs help to improve. To help the Team
understand themselves, where theyre weak, and where theyre strong.

In the call centre environment, Pentland10 showed that increased face to face
communication accounted for 35% of the differences in Team performance. Since call
centre Teams are less communication intensive than knowledge work, we would expect
this percentage to be even higher for software development Teams.

To measure cohesion you can either use the sophisticated sociometric badge11 or a pen
and paper. The goal is to gather enough rough information to create a network graph
like the ones below.
1. Obtain permission from your Team.
2. Create a grid like the one below.
3. Record any face-to-face interaction between two people.12 Work related or not, it
doesnt matter. As we will see in the water cooler section coming up, social
conversation is as important as work related conversation.

After a few days of your data collecting, Team members will stop paying attention to
what youre doing and the data you gather will be a good measure of the norm.

After a week you should end up with a table that looks like this:

Name Sue John Tonia Kirby Brad Martin Ian Doug
Sue - 90 30 12 41 6 17 54
John - 81 59 50 37 30 49
Tonia - 39 60 0 58 91
Kirby - 30 29 36 72
Brad - 0 12 93
Martin - 92 8
Ian - 111

10 The New Science of Building Great Teams, Alex Sandy Pentland

http://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-teams/ar/pr
11 A sociometric badge (commonly known as a "sociometer") is a wearable electronic device capable of

automatically measuring the amount of face-to-face interaction, conversational time, physical proximity
to other people, and physical activity levels using social signals derived from vocal features, body motion,
and relative location. from: http://hd.media.mit.edu/badges/
12 Pentland goes further defining Energy: energy, which we measure by the number and the nature of

exchanges among Team members. A single exchange is defined as a comment and some
acknowledgmentfor example, a yes or a nod of the head. Normal conversations are often made up of
many of these exchanges, and in a Team setting more than one exchange may be going on at a time.
When recording conversations in a more simplified form its easier just to count the conversations to
start. This effectively treats all conversations as equal.

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 11

Which might turn into a graph looking like this:

This snapshot of the Team from The Worlds Smallest Online Book Store, taken after
the Team has been working together for 6 months, looks fairly healthy. The obvious
weak spots - Martin has only one strong relationship with Ian and weak ones with Kirby
and John. In addition, we can see that Kirby is still new to the Team so, while he talks to
most people, he has few strong relationships. Martins relative isolation is harming the
Team by making it all too easy for him to miss the Teams greater goals and work on the
wrong thing.

Pentland has shown that Teams with unequal exchanges in energy over time make
weaker decisions, because theyre relying on the input and ideas of only a few dominant
Team members and not the whole.13 Pentlands evidence supports what is commonly
called The Wisdom of the Crowd that a group of people with diverse, independent
opinions will make better decisions than a single expert.

In an Agile Team, were trying to ensure that all Team members have an independent
voice so we gain the greatest benefit of that wisdom.1415

13 The New Science of Building Great Teams - Alex Sandy Pentland
14 More detail in The Wisdom of Crowds James Surowiecki
15 Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd#Classic_examples (retrieved Nov 17,

2014) At a 1906 country fair in Plymouth, eight hundred people participated in a contest to estimate the

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 12

So it turns out that building trust requires understanding
someone beyond just the work they do. Surprisingly, social
conversation matters.

In Pentlands call centre studies, it became clear that over 50% of the conversations
were social in nature. Not only did the social conversations improve productivity, they
also reduced stress.

weight of a slaughtered and dressed ox. Statistician Francis Galton observed that the median guess, 1207
pounds, was accurate within 1% of the true weight of 1198 pounds.

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 13

Coach the Team and Interactions

Now that we see the value of cohesion and have a lightweight method of measuring it,
how do we grow it?
Move the focus from just coaching an individual's development efforts (e.g. coding,
testing, analysis), to coaching the whole Team. Place an emphasis on improving the
interactions among Team members. Start by observing who each person interacts with
and how.

Things to observe with each individual Team member
Do they face others during meetings or do they make an effort to hide physically?
Do they speak loudly and clearly enough to be heard and understood by their
peers?
Is someone else on the Team dominant at the expense of others?
Are the people who are isolated attempting to contribute and being ignored?
Do they cutoff others and therefore discourage others from listening to them?
Do they talk to only one other Team member?
Is there a flow, or give and take, when theyre involved in the conversation?

Tactics
Have regular one-on-ones with your Team members. Use this time to provide
feedback and help Team members see how their habits and behaviours are seen.
Our goal is to help people see their impact on the Team. I strongly recommend
taking the meetings offsite - to change the power dynamic and to ensure no one
else can see/hear what is being discussed.
Give Team members tactful feedback on how much they face others, interrupt,
how well they listen. Take time to praise the improvements you do see, as well as
commenting on the changes you want.
Model the behaviour you expect of others, being open and honest about your
own failings. Mine include a need to interrupt before someone else has finished
speaking and weaker listening skills than I would like.
Rearrange office seating to encourage Team members to interact with people
they dont otherwise talk with.
Create opportunities to encourage social conversation.
Consider a headphone-free time if many of your Team members use music to
shut out the world. Pick a couple of hours a day that are headphone-free times,
and the rest are headphones-allowed.
If Team members have similar music tastes, bring in some speakers and have
Team members take turns being DJ.
With quieter or less confident Team members, consider:
- asking for written input to a retrospective
- allowing pairs to speak in Daily Scrum
- practicing/rehearsing with the Team member what they want to say in
Daily Scrum
Change Team members only as a last resort.

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 14

Why the Water Cooler Location Matters

Weve been saying that the location of the water cooler matters, so lets delve into why.

Neither formal corporate meetings nor chatting at desks about work increased
cohesion. Instead, it was overlapping break times and common lunches that had the
greatest effect. Both Waber and Pentland have shown that informal, unstructured social
conversations have a large role to play at increasing cohesion, yet we often pay little
attention to it.

We would all like to believe that our Scrum meetings (Sprint Planning, etc.) have greater
effect since they democratize the exchange of information and increase cohesion.
However we dont yet have the evidence to prove that. Instead of trying to improve our
meetings, we need to create better social opportunities.

Water coolers are where you bump into people in the office that you havent seen in a
while, and theyre where you gossip about coworkers or talk about last nights game. They
serve a crucial social function that desks and meeting rooms cant provide.16

Its not good enough to buy a water cooler. You also have to decide where to put it to
enhance collaboration. Placing it in the wrong area can actually reduce the very effect
were trying to create. Ive seen the water cooler (and coffee machine), placed in an out
of the way corner of an office, so far from the Teams that its rarely visited. In another
client office, the kitchen area had a prominent sign saying, Please be quiet, people are
working nearby. Both the sign and location send a strong signal that social
conversation isnt a constructive, important part of work.

Design your work area to enhance social conversations,
not quiet them.

So place the water cooler, coffee maker, or kitchen in a place where it can become a
focus for the Team. Put it somewhere where the additional noise will have a minimum
impact on other Team members.

Beyond the water cooler, your organization can do other things to give the Team
increased opportunities to socialize. These can be as simple as sponsoring a regular
Team lunch, or finding another regular activity in which to participate. Instead of
imposing an idea on the Team, provide a budget and ask them to pick an activity, then
run an experiment for a month or two to find what works for them.


So why does all this social time matter?
Discussing deeper technical issues that come up in Teams requires Team members to
share a common background and trust each other. The common background goes
beyond the technical details of our work and includes understanding each other as
people. Building these bonds requires social time.

Fresh input from outside the Team

16 Pg 57 People Analytics Ben Waber

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 15

To balancing cohesion, we know our Teams need to continue seeking new ideas from
beyond the Team and the organization.

To that end, consider bringing in longer lunch tables. Invite outside speakers to sit in on
meetings. Encourage Team members to attend conferences and report back with ideas
and challenges to discuss as a group.

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 16

Specific and Challenging Performance Goals

Weve seen it repeated over and over again: to achieve high performance, your Team
needs specific and challenging performance goals. Unfortunately, the advice rarely makes
clear what specific and challenging equates to.

Why do goals matter?
An effective goal is meaningful to each Team member and is focused on meeting the
organizations needs. Effective goals provide17:
Focus ensuring Team members put their energy towards the things that
matter, and not triviata.
Energizing high goals help people put more energy into the problem.
Persistence with a clear target, people are willing to put in an extended effort
over a period of time.
Tactics Team members do a better job bringing their existing skills to bear.
Creativity people find new ways of solving their problems when it becomes
clear that the existing strategies wont work.

To the extent that Team members believe a goal is achievable, increased difficultly in
the goal corresponds to increased effort and performance.18

Ambiguous goals make it difficult for Team members to know whether their actions are
helping the whole Team get to done.

Original Goal Improved Goal
Improve page load performance The following three pages should load faster
than one second.
Bookstore website selling books Be able to ship one book to one customer.
New cash register program, installed in all Cash register program installed in one low
stores volume store, no support for returns.
More Unit Tests Each new Class is unit tested.
Fix Bugs Have the top five bugs fixed by the end of the
Sprint.

Effective goals are focused and specific. The original goals in the example above provide
unclear targets (Improve page load performance by how much? which pages?) or
are unachievable in a reasonable time (Bookstore website selling books and New
cash register program, installed in all stores). Whereas the improved versions provide
a focus for the Teams action during the Sprint, ensuring Team members apply their
energy on the right activities.
Tactics
On many occasions weve seen goals to challenge the team, but theyre so vague and
poorly understood, they provided no benefit. What distinguishes effective goals from
ineffective ones? Actions with clear intent.

17 Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: A 35-Year Odyssey Locke E.

and Latham G. retrieved Sept 23, 2014

18 ibid

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 17

Team Formulation Goals handed down from above can be effective, but not if theyre
poorly understood, which can often be the case. Waste happens in software
development when Team members put a lot of energy into the wrong thing because
they didnt understand what the precise goal was. Not just waste, but frustration and
demotivation within the Team. It is far more effective to take time during Sprint
Planning to formulate a clear goal for the Sprint in concert with the Product Owner.
Building the goal together means the Team will have a deeper understanding of what
the goal represents, and will feel a greater sense of ownership.

Daily Rechecks The Team need to ask themselves every day: Are our actions still
focused on achieving the goal? The question challenges Team members to refocus if
they lost sight of it temporarily, and to check if the goal is achievable. If done during
Daily Scrum, it also gives Team members an opportunity to show how their work
moved the goal a step closer to done.

Distractions Boundaries and expectations should be clear when addressing the
common challenge of distractions. For example, if someone from outside the Team
arrives asking for a favour this Sprint, a Team member can walk them over to the Task
Wall and show them the goal for the Sprint Backlog and the Product Backlog. Explain
that granting the favour will make the goal unachievable for the Sprint. Instead, ask
them where the favour fits into the Product Backlog as it stands. This creates an
understanding around where the favour fits in the overall work and acknowledges their
need without disrupting the agreed upon goals already in place.

Public Commitment Making the Teams goal public increases the sense of personal
commitment towards it (assuming Team members were involved in setting it). Once
committed to something, people will go to great efforts to be consistent with that
commitment19. The simplest approach would be to put a paper on the Team Wall near
the Sprint Backlog and ask all Team members to sign their name to it. If people are not
willing to sign their name, then that signals the goal isnt yet one that they believe is
feasible or appropriate, so take the time to refine the goal.

Feedback For goals to be effective, we need feedback on our progress towards the
goal. For Team goals, the feedback needs to be shared with the whole Team allowing the
Team to adjust or self organize when theyre not meeting the goal.

Goal Feedback Team Response
The following three pages Page load time has been Several Team members
should load faster than one improved but one page is drop other work to help
second. still lagging loading in 2 the original person to
seconds on our test machine meet the goal
Be able to ship one book to The Team are struggling to The Team talks to the
one customer. work successfully with Product Owner and
FedEx our initial shipping explain that UPS have
vendor simpler, easier to use
interface. They can build
the first version against

19 Influence Science and Practice Robert B. Cialdini

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 18

UPS and get it done

sooner.

Finally, even when theyre not achievable in a single Sprint, a specific goal can help
Team members see if their efforts are going in the right direction. E.g. the Team is
struggling to get one book shipped to one customer, because collecting sales tax in
Quebec (QST) requires a QST number they dont have. The goal guides the Team
members into having a conversation with the Product Owner, and together they decide
to put the first customer in Ontario (because they already have what they need for that)
and start the QST number application process. Without the focus of the goal, they would
have thrashed when they encountered the problem.

Goals at Multiple Levels

It helps to have goals the strategic direction for the product or Team, aka the vision -
at two different levels.

Short Term goals are goals at the Sprint level, and each should be seen as a meaningful
step forward along the road to achieving the vision. Each Sprint Goal helps the Team
focus and feel a sense of accomplishment, which is invaluable for moral and cohesion.

When it comes to creating a Product Vision as a longer-term goal, many Agile Teams use
collaborative games like Product Box or Remember the Future to facilitate collaboration
between the customer(s) and the Team doing the work.

Distributed Teams
In distributed teams, its important to note that communication over email doesnt build
and grow relationships. In fact, it can damage it. Without the ability to use our
evolutionary skills of interpreting voice, body language, and micro expressions, email
(and instant messaging) can result in a Team of isolated members interacting on a
surface level only, which is far from our goal. Video conferencing can improve that, but
only negligibly. Creating opportunities for in-person interaction and encouraging that is
an important key to building high performance in remote Teams.

Agile Pain Relief Five Steps Towards Creating High-Performance Teams 19

Summary

In our desire to reap the results of a High-Performance Team, sometimes the science
and magic of how to achieve that is lost. Focus is put on product and deadlines, rather
than the natural resources the people that are critical to those accomplishments.

By focusing on what science and experience tells us, we can create an environment for
the magic to happen.

We know that a Team that works together for a long time will create a natural efficiency
in communication, and build trust through expectations and commitments.

We know that we can increase that efficiency by providing opportunities for social
interaction (e.g. water cooler), and that its that cohesion where the magic starts to
reveal and grow.

We know that its important that the Team always has a sense of where theyre going,
and where they are along the way. Specific, agreed upon, goals will fuel and accelerate
their efforts, rather than assigned vague ones that bottleneck and frustrate.