What Problem Did We Need to Solve?

The organization had reached a point where the technology department was increasing in size by roughly one person a week, but they noticed that adding new people no longer meant they were getting more done; if anything, the speed of delivery was actually slowing down. At the time people weren’t organized into fixed teams; rather, the teams were assembled at the start of a project and disassembled when the project ended. Employees were not dedicated to a team or project; their time was split into percentages and their assignments were determined by their manager.

Over the course of time a web of dependencies had evolved whereby every person and project were reliant on someone else, and there were always a significant number of handovers and delays between groups of people. Projects were constantly being paused and put on hold because there was no one available to work on them; everyone was busy somewhere else. No one had an overview of the people and the projects, so there was no big picture of what was happening.

Sound familiar?

We wanted to avoid the delays caused by waiting for staff to be freed from other projects, and we wanted to minimize handovers with their associated loss of tacit knowledge. Our strategy was to pull people out of this complex matrix and move them into fixed, stable teams where we could ensure that one person would work on only one team, and one team would work on only one project at any time. (Note that we use the term project, but technically it was more of a value stream or initiative, as there frequently was no hard start or end date.)

So, let’s get started. In the first chapter we dive into what a stable team design looks like and why it’s so important. Then we break down the process we took to guide Trade Me through a self-selection event, beginning with how we created the right context and ending with how we facilitated it toward a successful outcome. (While we discuss Trade Me’s self-selection success story, this book was a completely independent project and not affiliated with or associated with Trade Me in any way.)