The 4 Keys To Assembling a Successful Agile Development Team

To master successful business transformations, organizations across every industry must come up with a strategy for delivering products and services that have their ideal customer in mind. But the road to agile application development is met with many challenges. Some IT leaders have even experienced their own difficulty with implementing some of these agile methodologies.

Collaboration is a crucial key to your organization’s success. It starts by having a well-assembled team. What makes your team successful? It depends on the traits and values of each individual who contributes to your agile team. In this guide, you’ll learn about the core concepts and valuable insights for coaching, hiring, and recruiting your teams.

Each of the following four factors should be on your mind when choosing and developing the members of your teams, based on research.

Motivation
Motivation comes with increased efficiency, productivity, and risk to focus on customers and outcome as part of an overall goal. Since your business has been focused on the customer and set of values, it’s time to shift that focus. Set clearly defined outcomes for your organization and processes. That should be centered on the customer vision and the desire to deliver those outcomes.

However, your staff will be more motivated by these positive outcomes. You can get a lot more out of your staff by helping them understand their customer and the outcome they’re trying to reach. Successful organizations truly care about the outcomes they’re achieving, and people who succeed in agile development will find that passion.

It’s important to look at the customer’s hopes, dreams, and goals. What gets them excited in the morning? Where do they see themselves in 5 to 10 years from now? The ones that enjoy approaching these problems will see it as an opportunity to learn more about your customers. This will drive your organization to succeed.

Expectations & Trust
As stated before, agile development is focused on teamwork. A successful team consists of individuals who work well together and does what’s expected of them to deliver the desired outcomes. But there will be times when the colleagues, customers, and stakeholders will not get along. Since most agile teams are based on a flat organizational hierarchy and are more self-directed than guided, there needs to be some sort of balance.

It’s important to build trust among your team in the development stage. Most leaders love to assign work to their team members and tell them what to do. Not only is this ineffective, but it’s demoralizing. Instead, you should balance value management with work management.

This helps build trust and transparency throughout your team. This can be hard to achieve when the same person who’s doing the incentivizing is also doing the managing. Servant leadership will never achieve the desired outcomes and expectations. It’s important to establish trust and transparency, which are vital factors to successful agile teams.

Engage with each of your team members and ask questions. Find out how members work with each other. Learn about how they manage their work and what others expect of them. This allows you to hire the right people that your agile team needs.

Customer-Centric Approach
The best agile teams engage with your customers and find out their desires. When it comes to traditional organizations, there’s usually one point of contact. In agile development, there are agile teams and customers who learn together to achieve a goal and find the best solution.

When your agile team is focused on the agile approach as well as your customers, it delivers tremendous value to your customer and the research shows. Since your agile application development team is already feeling motivated, they feel good about helping your customers. To ensure that you have the right people on these teams, ask them questions about what the customer experience and customer service means to them. Successful agile team members should know the difference between these two terms.

Care for the Craft
Caring about their craft and the desired outcomes can help them deliver incredible work. Successful agile teams take pride in the products and services they provide. This pride is often more important than the pride with the process, according to recent research.

One of the biggest challenges for traditional organizations that are undergoing a transformation is to understand the ambiguities and complexities of their work. This can’t work if they don’t understand what the problem is. In innovative and IT-driven environments, the members and the work that they face are complex but always changing.

More agile teams don’t know what the work is about or what the problem is until they start working on it. When a successful agile team reviewed the relationship among the process, the value, and the outcomes it achieves, then they know that the process could change as time goes along.

To ensure each of your team members is invested in their work, ask questions about their previous work experiences that they’re proud of. Find ways to connect those previous experiences with their goals and values that also meet the goals and values of your organization.