Kicking Off a New Squad

As things fall into place, you will often have new squads starting in rapid succession. You need to make sure that they’re given the best possible start. After all, while the significant team-design part is now complete, 30% of a team’s success will depend on how it’s launched, as discussed in The Science Behind Team Design.

During self-selection people prove that they can be trusted to solve complex problems, know what’s best for them and the company, and act as trusted adults. In the spirit of letting people control their way of working, we never mandate whether a squad should run scrum, kanban, their own special creation, or a traditional way of working. Following Daniel Pink’s principles of motivation,^[10] one of the key forms of autonomy is being in control of your processes. Giving people autonomy over who they work with should be extended by letting them choose how they work together.

It’s important to maintain the spirit of self-selection and to ensure that squads understand that the trust and control they were given in designing their own squads isn’t a one-off but an ongoing way of working. Truly high-performing squads need to be in control of the way they work. When our squads started, we guided them through a process of selecting agile and lean practices to help them come up with a system that worked for them.

Who Should Be There?

The entire squad. If someone can’t make it, find a different date—it’s really important that everyone have a say in how the squad is going to work.

There should be a facilitator with enough agile experience to facilitate a discussion around when to use scrum, when to use kanban, and the purpose and meaning of each agile practice. An agile coach would be ideal, but others with the same knowledge would work too.

How Much Time Do We Need?

Depending on team size and personalities, reserve somewhere between a couple of hours and a day.

What Do We Do?

Part 1: Get to Know Each Other (One–Two Hours)

For the team to work well together in the future, they need to establish connections while building trust and understanding for each other. We recommend using an exercise such as Lyssa Adkins’s “Journey Lines” as a starting point. This exercise has proved to be one of the best team-building activities we’ve experienced.

Journey Lines involve people drawing a graph that represents the journey of their career and/or private lives. People draw along two axes, one of time and and one of happiness. They’re free to share as much or as little as they’re comfortable with. You can find additional detail and instructions for this exercise in Lyssa Adkins’s excellent book Coaching Agile Teams. [Adk10]

Part 2: Choose Your Agile Ingredients (One Hour)

In this part the squad defines how they will work, including which elements of agile they will use. We start off with the squad generating a list of agile ingredients and practices they know from scrum, kanban, XP, or anything else. Participants simply shout out the practices, and the facilitator writes them on a whiteboard to create a list of options.

This is what squads normally come up with (if your squad doesn’t, you can use this as a starter list to bring up yourself):

• Sprints (If so, how long?)

• Kanban workflow

• Explicitly limit WIP

• Coordination: daily standup

• Feedback process: retrospectives

• Visual workspace

• Measure/track velocity? cycle time? lead time?

• Planning: sprint planning? on demand or on a regular basis?

• Backlog refinement sessions

• Forecasting, product burnup charts, burndown charts

• Sprint reviews (demonstrations)

• Test-driven development, specification by example

• Coordination with other squads: scrum of scrums

• Have an agile coach

Next it’s important to discuss each practice/ingredient and decide what the team will choose to use or experiment with. The purpose of this is to further develop the understanding of these practices with members making active choices about how they will work—as opposed to blindly following a process.

For any practice the squad decides not to do, ask how else the practice’s purpose will be achieved. For example, if a squad decides not to have stand-up meetings, they’ll need to decide how they’ll meet the aim of that practice—coordination.

There are two agile practices we believe should remain mandatory: retrospectives and physical story walls (if you are co-located). Retrospectives are key because they drive continuous improvement; deciding not to keep a retrospective is like saying “We don’t want to get better.” Physical story walls are important, particularly to new squads, because they act as a focal point for conversations. While a new squad may not yet be ready for healthy conflict, the presence of a board allows the important issues to be visualized—and people can have those healthy discussions around the board.

Part 3: Decide on the Practical Stuff (Thirty Minutes–One Hour)

Once you’ve decided which practices to follow, it’s time to deal with the practical matters. These will include the squad’s definition of “done,” the length of sprints, and the time and day meetings will take place. The squad should also decide which tools it will use or those it will experiment with as a starting point.