Improving the agility of the company is to improve the performance of the agile team. Because when there is an evolution of each component, there is also, consequently, an evolution in the value deliveries that the team is capable of making.
Discover 05 items on how to invest in developing the technical and behavioral capabilities of agile teams that generate value for the customer and organization.

01- Know how the agile team really is

First to have a starting point, find out how the team is doing:

• • • How is the work environment?
    • How is the learning progress?
    • How is the collaboration between the members?

To get this knowledge, the One-on-One (or 1:1) meeting, use this time as an opportune time to build a solid relationship with the members.

Learn how to hold 1:1 meeting: How to hold One-on-One Meeting

02- Build a better environment

In this sense, after knowing how all the members are doing, deepen bonds in the trust and transparency of all, looking for ways to express themselves.
Through Niko Niko Calendar, each team member is able to express themselves daily. Over a period, he manages to reflect on how the team is doing and implement actions for the best environment where everyone can express themselves.

Learn about Niko Niko Calendar

03- Awaken new habits and behavior patterns

Encourage a growth mindset among team members. Since no one knows everything or possesses all the skills and abilities capable of doing everything alone. Therefore, even if it is a small team, when it comes to complementing skills so that everyone can maintain the level of efficiency capable of producing the results desired by the organization.

However, if they remain stagnant and without stimulation, members end up disinterested, which directly affects productivity.

Stimulate the Mindset Triad .

04- Be clear about the purpose of the team

If organizations exist to meet a specific market need, the teams that comprise them are certainly part of this strategy. Somehow, from the individual to the sum of everyone’s work, it has a significant contribution to achieving certain goals.

That way, the direction that everyone follows needs to be the same. The more they are aligned with the objectives, the better decisions they can make about the value delivery they are responsible for.

So, it’s about aligning the purpose for successful delivery.

Understand how to build an agile team with purpose

05- Evaluate the growth journey

Ultimately, the team is equivalent to a living organism. With each delivery cycle, it learns about its results, whether positive or negative. From there, they adapt evolutionary improvements to get rid of problems and promote actions that can generate value in the customer’s perception.

After all, as time passes, challenges are overcome and new learnings emerge. Correctly evaluating this journey helps to understand how the team is becoming agile.

Conduct Maturity Assessments.

In this way, continuously develop and improve each team in the organization.

Try beefor, with it you can inspire and empower people, making your work amazing, with today’s visibility and predictability for tomorrow’s success.

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Conducting the Daily Scrum constantly contributes to improving the communication and engagement of the agile team in favor of the desired results through the product vision. However, knowing exactly how this meeting is carried out is important so as not to lose the purpose for which it is intended.

Read more here: Your Daily is about to change

Several teams were used to periodically presenting the “status” of the project’s progress or deliveries to the leadership. Therefore, when making the transition to agile methods, they transfer some vices that harm the result of the meeting.

Daily Scrum with results

The Daily Scrum needs to be an effective and results meeting. In other words and in a practical way, it is where you inspect progress towards the Sprint Goal and the evolution towards the completion of the work in the Sprint Backlog. So here are 5 tips to implement today and get more benefits:

01- Respect the 15-minute timebox

According to the Scrum Guide, the maximum duration of the Daily is 15 minutes. This imposes on the team the need to be objective and direct. That is, it allows members to focus on what really matters and report progress or impediments to achieving the Sprint goal.

If the speech of a team member is not adding value, suggest that a certain issue can be resolved later, so that the focus is maintained and the timebox respected.

02- Focus on the Sprint Goal

The focus is on evaluating progress towards achieving the Sprint Goal. Each day needs to represent progress towards the Sprint goal. Therefore, in each Daily, activities are reviewed and planned for the next 24 hours.

This is where the team’s progress is inspected, limiting itself to what has been done, what will be done and its impediments.

03- Identify impediments

During the reports, impediments may arise. They appear throughout the development of activities and hinder or delay progress. It should be noted that the Daily is not to solve them, but to carry out their identification.

Then, after completion, together with the Scrum Master, take time with the members who identified the impediment to understand in more detail to help them.

04- Give visibility to activities

One of the principles of agility is to make it clear and understandable to everyone involved what is happening. In this way, transparency becomes relevant, especially in projects that involve a high degree of complexity. To achieve this, simply make available to the team, for example, the Scrum Board or kanban. Through them, the team maintains the activities and their respective status in a visual way of the progress of the sprint. By demonstrating the different stages of the value stream, it encourages communication between members and clearly conveys progress.

In this sense, hold the meeting around the task board, if you are remotely, share the virtual board with everyone to highlight the evolution towards the Sprint goal.

05- Produce an action plan for the day’s progress

At the end of each Daily, have an action plan agreed between the members for the working day. It should be possible to meet until the next day, when a new meeting will be held and the progress will be inspected again.

That way all members focus on what really needs to be accomplished.

The daily meeting is the moment in which the team articulates adaptations to be executed during the day and to be able to advance towards the Sprint goal.

With beefor you can register the Daily, make action plans and check the history.
This provides greater transparency for the team and focus on what is most important.

Get to know today what it’s like to have the beefor experience and bring more agility to your team! And you don’t need a credit card ?

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If you liked this article, you may also be interested in these that describe the other Scrum meetings:

• Sprint Review: in addition to the demonstration of what was done ;
• Retrospective: making the continuous improvement of your team ;
• Sprint Planning – result and value for the organization ;

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Personal Mapping, also used as an icebreaker dynamic, increases team synergy and empathy.

Your goal is to bridge the gap between people, which may seem simple enough, but has a powerful effect.

At this moment where remote work is strongly present, it is important to work on relationships between team members. For that this tool will help in a very easy way!

How does Personal Mapping work?

The idea is to build a mental map with the personal information of each member, such as family, education, work, hobbies, values, friends, goals, among others.

In the image below you can see an example of the practice inside beefor :

This information will be available to everyone on the team and can serve as common topics (hence the icebreaker).

This dynamic also enables communication and proximity between people. Well, it inserts trivial matters that could be brought up in a moment of coffee break in the company. But without the need to be present in the same physical space.

How to associate with 1:1 Feedback (one-on-one)

The Personal Map technique can combine with the practice of 1:1 Feedback . Similarly, it contributes to the clarity of the person’s personal and professional goals. So that at each meeting you can follow the progress of each step taken towards what you want to accomplish.

In addition to asking questions about how your family is doing, the progress of college or a certification that the professional aims to achieve, among other issues that help the manager to get closer and closer to the team member.

How practice helps Agile HR

with beefor, we can track all employees digitally. Whatever aspects:

• Performance;
• Humor;
• Skills;
• motivations;
• Records of each 1-on-1 meeting.

With each creation of Personal Mapping with a collaborator, it shows that each person has a different profile from the other. However, some are more introverted and others are more easily able to communicate and relate. In this way, promoting this challenge to the professional makes them provide self-knowledge and access some important issues that often go unnoticed.

How Personal Mapping helps the manager

Personal Mapping is a great tool for onboarding a new team member. But in addition to all this, it makes the manager himself get closer to the employee. In this way, it contributes to a holistic view of each employee:

• Curiosities;
• Family;
• Formation;
• Personality;
• skills;
• Dreams/Goal.

In this way, with this information, the leader can promote actions so that he can motivate and encourage him to live and perform them.

In beefor, in addition to the manager, all team members have a vision of the personal mapping of each member.

Benefits for the Team

As a result of this practice, we were able to bring people together, create empathy with each other, in addition to maintaining a pleasant atmosphere in which to work. In addition, the technique can also favor teams with collaborative profiles, to support and help each person to achieve their goals and objectives.

Meet beefor today and everything he can do for your team!

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The platform also has features focused on People Management, such as Kudo Cards , Moving Motivators and Niko Niko Calendar .

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Held at the end of the Sprint, the Retrospective is the time to observe, examine and reflect on how the team is working and promote continuous improvement. Following the specific time box, what impacted the flow of deliveries, practices, people, communication, environment, artifacts, tools and so on will be identified. For this, the following steps are necessary:

1. Set the Retrospective Focus

An unfocused retrospective equals a meeting without an agenda. A lot will be talked about, discussed and the action with an effective result will be none. You will spend team time doing fun activities, but the main objective will not be achieved. Defining focus before carrying it out and sharing it among the participants allows everyone to prepare with the examples, evidence and data.

2. Select activity

Basically, the role of the activity is to create a playful and relaxed environment to facilitate the contribution and participation of everyone. The goal is to create and assemble evolutionary improvement insights. These activities may vary depending on the focus chosen for the Retrospective.

3. Collect evidence and data

Once there is a determined time box and everyone is aligned with the Retrospective’s focus, collecting evidence and data in advance helps to avoid “guessing”. For example: by using metrics to measure quality, productivity, adherence to the agile method, performance, value creation in the customer’s perception and other perspectives, it is possible to enable the team to find ways to identify improvement actions.

4. Prepare structure

It is necessary to define the place, time, facilitator of the activity, necessary resources, call of participants and everything else that is necessary to obtain the desired result of the meeting.

5. Carry out the Retrospective

Establish an environment of trust. In this way, everyone can be sure to express themselves without fear of any inconvenience. Through Retrospective, it is possible to search for data and evidence that will make it easier to transparently inspect what has been identified. Capture insights with insights into what could be improved. And then, decide what will be put in place to keep up with the evolution.

beefor has, in addition to alerts for agile ceremonies, metrics and other features that enable the expansion of your team’s capacity in the search for continuous improvement.

Do you want to get the agile evolution of teams and workflow with strategy in delivering value to the business? Request your free access right now!

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Everyone wants to work with amazing people and teams. Why? What does it mean for a team to be awesome?

Teams are the foundation of organizations. Today it is more than proven that we need to give autonomy to those closest to the work, the product, the service, the customer – this is a basic principle of agile. If you have an amazing team, you will have more chances of success.

For simple reasons:

• They know their role in the organization’s strategy
• Know the customer better than anyone
• They know the product or service that is delivered to the customer (they are the ones who create, build and take care of it)
• They know each other as a team, they have the intimacy to perceive the weaknesses and strengths of each person
• They carry out the process they created themselves, and constantly improve it.
• They deliver indicators and give full visibility to where they are and where they are going
  

So now the question remains: what makes a team amazing?

The culture

People make culture. When we hear someone say about a proposal for change, “this is not going to work here because of our culture”, we can translate that to, “it’s not going to work here because people don’t accept change, they fear the new, they look for culprits and not they recognize that everything can be better or different and thus achieve better results”.

For these reasons, to establish a business-friendly culture, we need to develop people around “healthy” and stable teams in an environment or system suited to each reality and purpose.

A team is a community where people meet, share, learn and grow together. How can someone belong to something that doesn’t have a name, image, purpose and values?

Maybe the purpose and values of the organization are too big for the team, they are inspired by the purpose of the organization and its values, but they need something closer, more personal and personalized.

We start shaping a team’s culture by defining its purpose. Every team needs a personality, a name, a brand and a reason to exist, that is, its purpose.

It is also important for the team to determine their values, principles that guide them in achieving their purpose.

Finally, it is vital that the team is clear about the roles each person should fill and their responsibilities (PO, Team Lead or Facilitator, Agile Master/Scrum Master, and a technical lead).

These elements are the basis for the formation of culture. Establishing culture must be a constant and tireless process, with the participation and collaboration of everyone.

The Practices

Practices represent the way the team operates. How they plan things, how they organize themselves, how they deal with blockages and difficulties and how they demonstrate their work through metrics and process visibility.

We cannot doubt the power of practices. Teams that organize well around practices are amazing teams.

Teams must have what the Tribal Unity book calls MVA (Minimal Viable Agility), the minimum practices for a team to function, which are:

• Planning or replenishment meeting
• Daily or stand up meeting
• Review / Delivery / Delivery presentation
• Retrospectives

Other important practices are:

• Delegation Board – maintain clarity on the level of authority and autonomy teams have. When boundaries are clear, we expand teams’ ability to create without fear of restrictions. Also the Delegation Board is an important tool to demonstrate to the team how much the organization is tolerant of learning through experimentation and failure.
• Moving Motivators – 3.0 management practice that identifies the motivations of team members. This practice helps to analyze changes and other issues that can impact the motivation of people and the team.
• Assessments/Strategic Retrospective – Assessments are deep questions that help the team to reflect on what is really going well and what actions should be prioritized for the team to reach new levels of maturity and performance.
• OKRs – Incredible teams use the Objectives and Goals (OKRs) model as a compass that guides the decisions and path the team is choosing. Your OKR must align with strategic objectives, the organization’s purpose, and your own purpose as a team.
• Clarity about roles and exercising about practices is vital for great teams.
• Incredible teams do not have practices as their goal but they continuously optimize and improve their processes using practices as successful tools, with continuous inspection and adaptation.
  

Clarity about roles and exercising about practices is vital for great teams.

Incredible teams do not have practices as their goal but they continuously optimize and improve their processes using practices as successful tools, with continuous inspection and adaptation.

The flow

Incredible teams have a lot of clarity about their Value Stream Mapping. That is, where the demand arises and where and how it is delivered and to whom.

From this flow, the team creates a framework that gives visibility to each step of this flow. The framework associated with some techniques will help the team to identify bottlenecks and continuously improve the process. Incredible teams think with each cycle how their flow can be leaner, simpler and better, delivering more value.

Some of these techniques associated with flow are:

• Wip Limit
• Blockage Handling
• Metrics (Lead Time, Cycle Time, Throughput)
• CFD – Cumulative Flow Diagram Analysis
  

Another important characteristic of incredible teams is their natural ability to dominate their products, services and demands. They are able to easily “break” activities at the ideal level in order to facilitate their predictability of delivery and start to have more assertiveness in their metrics efficiently.

Conclusion

Building amazing teams is a big challenge. This construction needs to be aligned with strategy and other structure initiatives throughout the organization.

Creating culture, establishing practices and flow are ways to build really agile teams with the right temperature to deliver value to the business.

The role of managers is essential to generate a system or environment that favors the development of teams and how to work hard on all issues so that the team feels safe to carry out its work.

The leader of each team has a key role in this process, connecting and leveraging these 3 characteristics of incredible teams.

Quoting the words of Seth Godin (writer and speaker), “a team is a group of people connected to each other, connected to a leader and connected to an idea.” This illustrates the importance of teams in developing truly agile organizations.

Count on the beefor!

The management platform has some agile practice tools on its platform that will help the manager to perform routine tasks focused on managing people and results. Discover and learn how some tools can help you on the journey: Moving Motivators , Niko Niko Calendar , Personal Mapping, and more!

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Niko Calendar It is an interesting practice to assess the feelings of the people on your team on a day-to-day basis. Its objective is to increase the motivation or well-being of the members by creating an environment where everyone can express themselves.

How Niko Calendar Works

It is a visual tool in calendar format. In it, people express themselves and the manager can act on possible malfunctions to efficiently support their teams.

Therefore, the way to carry it out is very simple: the team meets, according to a defined period, and shares on the calendar the feeling that sums up their day.

In this sense, in addition to being a support tool in Management 3.0, it is also one of the features that make up the beefor.

Thus, this 360° look at people and teams and complementing the delivery and success metrics with Artificial Intelligence algorithms is just beefor!

How to use Niko Calendar

As with Management 3.0 practices, this can be used in whatever way works for the team. There are times that prefer to identify your mood in the morning, after the daily or the end of the day.

However, the important thing is to experiment and define the best strategy together. After all, it will be moments of reflection by the team that, with transparency, everyone can contribute to building a better environment for everyone.

Curiosity

Originally from Japan, Niko-Niko means “to smile”. And this is your role, to help the manager and the teams to smile in the end.

Count on beefor’s support to support the cultural change of your team!

beefor it has several agile practice tools on its platform that will help the manager to perform this task. So, now that you know about this practice, see how the Moving Motivators , Personal Mapping and Kudo Cards can help in this process:

Start now!

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Organizations need their gears to be maintained by free teams, with people who don’t rely on command to carry out their functions. For this, the leadership needs to promote autonomy, making it clear who is responsible, why and their level of performance. To delegate is to assign authority to someone to carry out certain activity(ies). Being a way of distributing trust for the results that will come from the efforts of other people.

knowing how to delegate

Delegating is empowering the team in a non-binary way: “I do it” or “you do it”. It is a relationship of trust and maturity between those involved that will depend on the context, as there are levels that make it possible to classify the agreement with each person and their specific role.

The 07 Levels of Delegation based on Management 3.0:

The distribution of control and delegation of authority is done as follows:

• Say : I will tell them;
• Sell : I will try to sell to them;
• Consult : I will consult and then I will decide;
• Agree : let’s agree together;
• Advise : I will advise, but they will decide;
• Ask : I will ask later so they can decide;
• Delegate : I will delegate fully.

Each level of delegation demonstrates how far the team can go, being able to decide, for example: about vacations, selection of new employees, working hours, improvements, etc. Just make the classification and make the agreement between the team and the leadership. As there is no duality, the best result will be balance.

It should be noted that the lower the level of delegation, the more centralized and hierarchical decisions are.
On the other hand, as responsibility increases, the team will have more autonomy.

Delegation Board

It is the Management 3.0 tool in which the team demonstrates each member’s responsibilities and levels of authority. This functionality is available on beefor to promote the team’s empowerment and even if initially it has many occurrences in the first levels, it will have what it needs to support teams and leaders to build maturity towards a self-managing team.

Only beefor goes beyond agility, taking care of people and guiding teams in the best work model.

Also know: How to build an agile team with purpose, How Moving Motivators can help Agile HR and How to use the agile coach tip.

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The main result that is aimed at holding the daily meeting throughout the entire Sprint is to inspect the progress against the Sprint objective, so that if necessary, adapt the Sprint Backlog.

The Daily Scrum has a 15 minute duration limit, where each developer member describes how the progress was in a clear, transparent and objective way.
It’s about alignment to create advancement plan for the day and not status .

Daily on beefor

On the beefor platform, Daily is considered as the team’s fuel to drive them forward. When configuring it, indicating the time, it also starts to score, demonstrating an increase in the maturity of the application of agility.

By carrying out it with constancy, beefor through metrics demonstrates the increased maturity of the team.

On the other hand, the team maintains the pace of development on the right path, delivering valued deliveries.

How to perform the perfect Daily

To realize the perfect Daily it is important that all members of the development team participate and collaborate to re-plan and make decisions, not to solve problems.

In 15 minutes, efforts are focused on solving everything that involves the path towards the sprint goal and managing to generate the expected business value. That’s what’s at stake!

By checking progress toward the Sprint Goal and adjusting its plan accordingly, it’s up to the team to articulate adaptations to be carried out throughout the day.

With a shared vision of what needs to be done, the team is now committed to completing its work before the next meeting.

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Organizations are continually taking adaptive actions so that the customer experience is the best and incredible possible. When starting this constant journey for improvement, it will demand from the teams the creation of mechanisms that respond to this need, revolutionaryly establishing increasingly better levels of deliveries.

This means that each sprint is never equal to the other, both in terms of the value generated in the customer’s perception and for the team. That’s why it’s necessary to know:

• How to measure the improvements offered by agility;
• How much does it deliver through Throughput;
• How long to deliver by Leadtime.

Measuring the time from the beginning of demand to delivery of the product/service to the customer in a total way hides variations in the value stream. As this time span is large and there are several steps to reach the end, it is essential to know which stages of the flow take longer, their restrictions and also where there are bottlenecks or impediments.

Leadtime Breakdown

It is a measure of how much time passes between task creation, highlighting the duration of each phase until the work is completed. With this, it is possible to assess how much time each item took to reach the definition of ready for that phase and be able to move on to the next one. You can start with Lead Time, but you need to “slice” it according to the duration of each step of the process.

The visualization can be done through the accumulated bar graph of each phase, where on the horizontal axis the work items and on the vertical it shows the duration time.

By making it transparent to the team’s inspection, you will find baselines and benchmarks for each type of work item. These more detailed historical references can support more accurate estimates as well as possible improvements.

Improving Leadtime Breakdown

By constantly analyzing what is going through or what has already gone through the flow, it allows you to identify problems such as:

• Waits;
• Stage duration variations;
• Restrictions;
• Bottlenecks etc.

The more visible to the team the proportion of each step, the easier it will be to propose improvement actions. The intention is for the item to advance in a constant and predictable manner and, according to each scenario, improvement actions can be taken such as:

• Limit WIP- limit the amount of running items;
• Synchronize queues – act where items have restrictions or bottlenecks in your process;
• Reduce waits;
• Define upper and lower limits to act on the time variations of each step;

It is possible to manage the portfolio with beefor, the platform provides better synchronization between the end and beginning of each stage, giving more fluidity and improving the leadtime of your product/service.

Try it today, it’s free and you don’t need to register a credit card ?

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Also know about: Capacity, Sprint Planning and Sprint Review.

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One of the first challenges for teams that are starting out in agility is to understand their ability to deliver. But for that, it needs to eliminate waste from the flow and find the balance to maintain the delivery cadence. If you take on a lot of work to do in Sprint, there can be overload. If there is a lack of uniformity in size or few deliveries, it will cause irregularities with unpredictable or inconsistent results.

The Value Delivery Cycle , by connecting the potential of Agility with Lean through the agile journey, will offer greater value to the business in the shortest time possible, providing solutions to:

• Muri – overhead, WIP (number of running tasks) not limited;
• Mura – irregularity in the workflow;
• Mute – process or activity that does not result in customer value.

What is Throughput

Translated into Portuguese as an average flow rate, Throughput is the amount of tasks delivered in a given period. This metric is calculated from the number of completed items that meet the product’s finished definition. The period can be by week, month, Sprint (fortnightly) or according to the reality and needs of the team.

By measuring Throughput continuously, you will perceive the average flow, enabling better planning regarding the work of the team that should be developed and whether you will be able to deliver, thus improving predictability.

Improving Throughput

To improve the flow of deliveries, it is essential to manage the workflow and implement evolutionary improvements focusing on the 3M’s (Muri, Mura and Muda).

The next step is to find the balance between WIP (number of items running within the workflow), Lead Time and Throughput. Because the more items are worked within the period, the longer it will take to complete, reducing the delivery flow.

Workflow Management

With beefor it is possible to manage the entire cycle of demands, from the appearance of the idea, cost and deadline estimation, execution to the analysis of project performance indicators and collaboration of project teams.

And it goes beyond! beefor is the platform focused on governance and management of agile teams, which brings together configurable agile best practices, generating insights for continuous improvement.

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Cover photo given by drobotdean .

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