Agile Teams

Nothing beats an Agile Team

– SAFe Mantra

Definition: An Agile Team is a cross-functional group of typically ten or fewer individuals with all the skills necessary to define, build, test, and deliver value to their customer.

What is an Agile Team in SAFe?

An Agile Team is a cross-functional group of typically ten or fewer individuals with all the skills necessary to define, build, test, and deliver increments of value. Each team member is typically dedicated to one Agile Team. 

Each Agile Team is self-directed and manages its work to meet its goals and the needs of its stakeholders and customers. This makes assigning tasks to specific team members unnecessary, giving teams and individuals more freedom and decision-making power and improving engagement and enjoyment in the work. Creating long-lasting Agile Teams helps eliminate the inefficiencies and delays traditionally found in shorter-lived project-based teams. Leaders support Agile teams by providing guidance and freedom and recognizing high performance.

Agile Teams may be technical teams focused on building software or hardware products, business teams such as marketing, legal, or finance, or a blend of each. By quickly delivering work in small batches, all Agile Teams strive for fast learning and frequent customer feedback, adjusting their plans accordingly based on the results.

In SAFe, multiple Agile Teams work together as an Agile Release Train (ART) when a product is bigger or more complex than a single team can build. Collaborating with other Agile Teams, they build entire solutions working from a common ART backlog. All the Agile Teams on the ART are aligned to a common vision and roadmap and participate in ART events. Together, the teams on the ART continually optimize their practices, accelerating value delivery.

Great Agile Teams are more than just talented individuals. Agile Teams utilize ART and team events to make commitments alongside other teams on which the business can depend.

How to organize Agile Teams in SAFe?

SAFe Principle #10, ‘Organize around value, ‘ guides enterprises to organize people and teams to accelerate customer value delivery.

The book “Team Topologies [1]” suggests organizing teams in four main ways that are commonly used within SAFe to accomplish this:

1. Stream-aligned teams are capable of delivering value directly to customers.
2. Complicated subsystem teams work on complex and very technical areas, removing the need for other teams to do this highly specialized work.
3. Platform teams build common services and tools that other teams use.
4. Enabling teams offer support and expertise to help other teams when needed.

Who is on an Agile Team in SAFe?

The roles on an Agile Team will depend on the type of work each Agile Team does. Importantly, each Agile Team should have all the individuals required to define, build, test, and release an increment of value in their context.

In addition, each Agile Team contains two specialty roles.

1. The Product Owner (PO) contributes to the vision and roadmap of the ART and works with the Agile Team to define and prioritize the team’s work within the larger product and business setting.
2. The Scrum Master / Team Coach (SM/TC) implements and maintains Agile methods, boosts team performance, and collaborates with the Release Train Engineer (RTE) to support ART improvements and streamline value delivery.

The responsibilities of these roles are further outlined in Figure 1 below.

How does an Agile Team operate in SAFe?

Agile teams typically apply SAFe Scrum or SAFe Team Kanban. Many will use a combination of these and adapt their practices over time.

SAFe Scrum and SAFe Team Kanban provide a set of practices that guide the team. These include events, techniques, and communication strategies that enable the progress of the work.

Most teams start their Agile journey by adopting SAFe Scrum. Practices like iteration planning, commitment to iteration goals, frequent retrospectives, a daily sync, and adhering to a short iteration timebox become routine.

However, some teams’ work is better suited to responding to frequent and less plannable events. In this case, SAFe Team Kanban is often the preferred team operating model. SAFe Team Kanban is less dependent on iteration timeboxes, focusing more on a continuous flow of work through the backlog to the customer.

Regardless of the approach, all Agile Teams benefit from using Kanban boards to visualize and manage their backlogs and focus on improving flow.

Both methods are highly effective and are more alike than they are different. They both promote the delivery of value to customers more efficiently by:

• Working in small batches
• Keeping work-in-process (WIP) under control
• Removing delays
• Incorporating customer feedback to improve the product
• Reviewing and improving practices regularly

What are the responsibilities of an Agile Team in SAFe?

Agile Teams fulfill five primary areas of responsibility, as shown in Figure 2.

Each is described in the sections below.

Connecting with the Customer

Agile Teams focus on the customer by taking a Customer-Centric approach, which helps them fully grasp their experiences and needs. Agile Teams employ design thinking to understand the challenges and opportunities and develop appropriate solutions.

Build Empathy with the Customer – Agile Teams need to empathize with customers to more deeply understand their needs and foster stronger connections. To achieve this, Agile Teams should:

• Leverage Product Owners’ expertise.
• Observe and communicate directly with customers.
• Participate in product support.
• Use telemetry to monitor product usage.

Participate in Product Definition – Team members use their customer insights to craft user stories and acceptance criteria in collaboration with the Product Owner (PO).

Design and Execute Experiments – Agile Teams learn more about their customers and the solutions they need by doing different experiments. This means they might research a topic deeply or build early versions of a product to get feedback fast.

Planning the Work

Agile Teams plan their own work. Planning involves all team members and relies on collaboration and transparency. Effective planning facilitates alignment to a common goal while leveraging the flexibility and autonomy of each team member in achieving their objectives.

Create a PI Plan – PI Planning is the cadenced event where each Agile Team gains alignment with the rest of the teams on the ART for the upcoming PI. PI Planning provides the larger system view necessary to achieve shared goals. As a result of PI Planning, each team creates a set of Team PI Objectives. They also make enough of a story-level outline of the planned order of their work across iterations to feel confident in their objectives. This becomes their initial team backlog for the PI.

Iterate Team Plans throughout the PI – Once ART alignment has been established, teams perform shorter-term Iteration planning regularly during the PI. This planning aims to use the team and ART’s learnings throughout the PI to plan the next increment of value.

Refine the Team Backlog – As knowledge emerges, teams continuously refresh and refine their backlog. The backlog identifies and prioritizes the upcoming work to deliver the team’s committed value.

Delivering Value

Agile Teams deliver new functionality to customers.

Frequently integrate and test – Teams must combine developed pieces of functionality and check them often. This helps uncover problems early and gives the teams enough time to fix them.

Regularly synchronize with the rest of the ART – While executing the PI, a team has multiple checkpoints with the other teams on the ART, such as ART Syncs and System Demos. These events help everyone see the progress toward current PI objectives and help the ART adjust as needed.

Build the continuous delivery pipeline – An effective Agile development process depends on a continuous delivery pipeline optimized for Continuous Exploration, Continuous Integration, and Continuous Deployment.

Release frequently – Some Agile Teams can release directly to the customer. These teams may establish their own release process in alignment with other teams on the ART. Major release timings may be decided upon during PI Planning; routine deployments are often governed at the iteration level. Other releases can be event-driven.

Getting Feedback

Development speed is closely related to how quickly and accurately a team can get feedback. Without this feedback, mistakes pile up, and solutions become ineffective and delayed. Both customer insights and technical feedback are crucial for making progress.

Know the customer – Direct customer feedback from users provides valuable insights for the Agile Team. Where direct interaction with customers and the Agile Team is not possible, the Product Owner often acts as a bridge to the customer.

Frequently validate technical concerns – To address technical concerns, teams must constantly check their assumptions about the product’s architecture and how it’s being built. This involves regular integration, testing, deployment, research, and prototyping to explore different technical approaches efficiently.

Gather Data – Data is crucial for Agile Teams to understand how users interact with the functionality that the team creates.  Data identifies areas for improvement, helps prioritize upcoming work, proves and disproves assumptions, and ensures the resulting products meet customer needs.  By analyzing data, Agile Teams gain insights that are unavailable through intuition alone.

Improving relentlessly

Relentless improvement is a core value of SAFe. Agile teams constantly seek ways to improve their process and the outcomes they are responsible for. As a part of the improvement effort, Agile Teams do the following:

Run routine improvement events – Agile Teams use regular team-level retrospectives throughout the PI, most commonly every iteration. Teams use these events to identify ways they can improve their processes, practices, and behaviors. This focus helps each team to become more high-performing. Additionally, all teams on an ART participate in a joint Inspect and Adapt event to identify improvements that provide benefits across the entire ART for the upcoming PI.

Improve some things immediately – Some problems should be addressed as they occur, without waiting for the next improvement event. Addressing issues as they emerge is part of a culture of continuous improvement.

Share and align with other Agile Teams – Agile Teams share what they learn as they improve their working practices. This sharing promotes transparency and helps to create a learning culture across the ART and the company.

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References

[1] Skelton, Matthew, and Manuel Pais. Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow. IT Revolution Press, 2019.