Step 4: Prepare Materials and Stationery

Self-selection needs to be an interactive and visual event where everyone can see what’s going on and actively participate throughout the process. Following is a checklist of the suggested materials you should have on the day of the event:

Empty Squad Diagrams

You’ll need an empty squad diagram for each of the squads you want to create. As part of your planning for Step 4 in chapter 2 you will have defined the desired squads, and now it’s simply a case of creating the sheets so they can be stuck to the wall when employees turn up for your event.

The idea behind this is to have participants self-select by adding their photos to squad diagrams on the wall. That way you can build a live picture as the self-selection process progresses.

The image shows the layout of an empty squad diagram.

As you can see, the squad sheets were simply circles (or ovals) drawn on poster-sized paper. As simple as this looks, a fair amount of thought had gone into the layout. For example, the circle itself fits a maximum of seven photographs, which corresponds to the constraint that squads should be no more than seven people. There’s also a prominent title at the top of the sheet to enable everyone to see each squad at one glance—something we had noticed was important during our trials and is even more important the more squads being selected in one event.

The product owner’s picture is positioned on the side and not at the top. This was done on purpose to ensure we didn’t inadvertently imply a hierarchy within the squad. The product owner is simply the person with the business knowledge on the squad and not the leader. That person’s picture was also taped onto the sheet to make it permanent because the product owner had been preselected and was unlikely to change.

It’s also a good idea to prepare a separate squad sheet with the title “Not in a Squad.” This is for those who don’t know where to go initially. They can put their photos there to demonstrate to others that they are available for selection. This mitigates the risk of anyone hiding in the corner and being missed or inadvertently bypassing the process.

Photographs of Participants

Provide a photo of everyone involved in the self-selection event. Ideally, the photos should be easily recognizable from a distance and the right size for your squad sheets. We had learned from our trial that things go much more quickly when you can easily see the status of each squad and who’s in it.

Be aware that preparing these photos can take some time if your event involves a lot of people. With 150 participants, we spent hours printing and cutting out photos from the employee directory (as shown in the photo) and we really believe that level of effort and organization paid off. It also meant that we systematically went through the plan for the next day in detail and allowed us to pick up on anything we may have missed.

Also, be sure that no participant’s photo is missed. Forgetting a few photographs may seem trivial, but it can make the person whose photo is missing feel neglected and unimportant.

Skills Stickers

Skills stickers provide an easy way for people to discuss whether their squad has all the necessary skills and has a status of “ready.” In order to facilitate this conversation, provide color-coded sticky notes for people to indicate their skills. The intention is that they can put the sticky notes on top of their photo to display which skills they can cover for a squad.

For our event blue was development, yellow was test, dark pink represented business analysis, light pink designated UX/design, and database skill was gray. You can see an example of the skills stickers we used in the figure.

Don’t be hung up on the actual colors—they’re just a quick visual cue about each person’s skill(s) and are useful to surface shortages and surpluses. Because each squad will have different skill needs depending on its purpose and technology, it’s important to emphasize that the stickies visualize skills, not roles. It’s also important to encourage people to use more than one sticky for their photo if they can contribute more than one skill.

Skills Checklists

At the bottom of each squad sheet there are several rip-off sheets for the squad’s aggregated skills coverage. Their purpose is to give each squad the opportunity to collectively check off the skills, indicating and visually displaying whether or not they are complete. Without this, it can be difficult to quickly assess a squad when people are moving in and out during the self-selection event. Here’s a sample skills checklist that goes at the bottom of the squad sheets:

For each skill, the squad uses a check mark (skill is covered), an X (skill is not adequately covered), or N/A (not applicable, that is, not needed for this squad) to designate its current status. Needs differ for each squad, and not all squads need all skills (for example, an infrastructure squad probably won’t need any design skill).

Make sure you have enough of these little strips to use a fresh one for each squad and change it after each self-selection round. We recommend printing enough for four to five rounds per squad.

List of Constraints

Print several copies of your constraints (see our example constraints in the figure that follows) to display around the room. They will be a healthy reminder of the boundaries during the event.

Role Posters

If you’re introducing new roles as part of your self-selection event, it’s a good idea to create role description posters in addition to all the other communication you do about these roles. Bring your posters to the self-selection event so that people can have a quick refresher. In our case we found it especially useful to have the role of the squad masters visibly displayed on the walls because participants needed to be clear about the expectations if they were to put up their hand to take on the role in a squad.

Following are the role posters from our self-selection event, which are still on display around the office today.

First is the poster for the squad master role (which is similar to a scrum master but edited for anyone who may choose not to use scrum):

Here is the role poster for the product owner role, which may be new to people who haven’t worked on an agile team before:

The day before each self-selection event we spend time ensuring we have all the materials we need. This can be quite fun as we cut out photographs of everyone involved, prepare the color coding and checklists, and prepare large squad diagrams prepopulated with any information we already have such as squad names and product owner photos.