When Is it Time to Expand Your Agile Team?
So, you’ve done it—you’ve dedicated yourself to becoming agile and your team is now, for the most part, running smoothly. You’ve incorporated continuous testing, continuous integration, and an overall stronger sense of collaboration among different members of your diverse team. You’re close to becoming that well-oiled machine you set out to be. But should it stop there?
Should you expand your agile team to include an even greater number of members? And should you consider spreading your new agile knowledge to other members of the company to make the entire organization agile? Determining scale can be tricky, but if you’re looking to grow, there are a few key things to keep in mind.
First off, it’s important to adopt the correct mentality. If you’re going to push toward agile growth, you can’t be wishy-washy about it—you have to commit. Zephyr founder and CEO Samir Shah tells AgileConnection that the biggest agile hurdle is a mental one. After you adopt the proper mentality, assessing your maturity is key.
The size of the company is not as important a driver as the actual maturation of the testing organization. More mature process-driven orgs, be that small companies or large ones, immaterial … They can be more successful as they know how to build on any processes, like agile.
Once you know you’re mature enough and have the right mindset, list the challenges that go along with growth. Are we stable enough to expand? Will bringing in new members break up the chemistry of our team? Is the rest of the organization ready to go agile? Teams need to discuss these issues and come together with different questions, findings, ideas, and actions related to the growth.
If you come to the conclusion that product and company growth is essential and your team is ready for agile expansion, know this—a team of ten will not have the same dynamic as a team two or three times that size. Individual members need to adjust their expectations and learn to adapt to a new, expanded environment. Jobs you handled before might be best handled by a new teammate, and you need to be able to trust that person to complete the task as well as you did before.
If things don’t work out early on, don’t panic. Every single member of an agile team learns from one another, and mentoring is important for employees of all levels. If you’re ready for agile growth, be ready to learn—and don’t let the new challenges stop you from intelligently collaborating and maintaining a strong sense of team.
