High Performing Teams
Achieve more with multidisciplinary and
self-managing teams
In a modern development organization, teams are the foundation. People no longer collaborate in temporary project teams, but are part of a permanent and stable team that picks up the work. Working effectively in a team is a huge challenge. Especially when teams have a multidisciplinary setup for the first time. To support each other when working together with multiple disciplines requires stepping out of your comfort zone.
A team that is not properly composed and supported can result in a lack of trust within the team. At that point, a team is no longer able to deliver results. A team needs goals, discussion and collaboration to deliver results. That’s exactly why you need high performing teams: to deliver results.
"Coming together is a beginning.
Keeping together is progress.
Working together is success."
Henry Ford
Every person can make a difference
How do you recognize a high performing team?
- Better solutions
By having constructive discussions, asking for help and focus on quality - Focus
By working from a prioritized backlog and letting the team plan the work themself - Engaged team members
By setting a common goal to which everyone contributes - High reliability
By continuous learning and open communication about what is and is not going well
How do you create a high performing team?
A high performing team is not built by putting people from different disciplines together and leaving them to their fate. A team needs a clear goal and a place in the organization, so that they can work as independently as possible and can easily coordinate with other teams. In addition, the team needs the right skills and clarity about the roles in the team. The team cannot take care of these things itself, so strong leaders are needed to take care of this.
A team must also ensure that they have a clear working method. This working method is secured with a clear meeting structure, learning moments and agreement of roles. Quality and predictability are characteristics of a high performing team. And last but not least, people are different and therefore working together is sometimes difficult. It is good to keep an open conversation about team dynamics.
Leading the Change
Multidisciplinary teams
From delay in handovers to delivering value together.
To enable a team to deliver value, you want a multidisciplinary team. This ensures that fewer handovers are required from department to department. Handovers take time and knowledge is lost. By working together in one team with multiple disciplines, a real feature can be delivered instead of a process step.
Leadership
From a manager to a leader.
A high performing team is self directing and therefore requires less direct management. The role of manager changes to a leader who enables people to grow. The leader shows exemplary behavior in this. Think about: learning and improving, ensuring that a culture of trust is created where mistakes are allowed and action is taken on signals from the teams.
Focus
From being distracted all the time to working from a prioritized backlog.
Agile stands for flexibility, but that does not mean that there are no strict working agreements. A team that functions well has clear roles, events, artifacts and goals. We call this the “Team Essentials”. The essential elements that you need to set up for a team to be successful. One of those essentials is that work is prioritized from a backlog and the team picks up new work when they have finished other work.
Team values
From fear of conflicts to pride and trust.
Working together is difficult. That is why it is good to not only consider the functional activities, but also to look at the collaboration within the team. Team members look at their own behavior and the influence on the team. It’s good that people are different. How can you ensure that people are empowered? And what are the values of the team that everyone commits to?
Would you like to know more about what we can do for your organization in these areas of high performing teams?
Tooling for better collaboration
Well-designed tools are essential for creating effective teams.
This contributes to:
- One truth of the priorities and the work to be done.
- Alignment with other teams: what are the dependencies?
- An overview of the current status of the work.
- Sharing knowledge and information.
