Can you measure a well balanced Agile Team

CAN YOU MEASURE A WELL BALANCED TEAM?

Can you measure a well rounded team?

Roles within agile organisations

What were we trying to achieve?

• Understanding the different skills

• Roles with the same name doing different things

• Different roles doing the same thing

• What were the common areas, what was specialised?

• How could you identify if you had the skills needed on a team?

• Different projects may need different skills

• Could you put together a team based on these profiles?

The Experiment - Quantify

• Where do we spend our time today?• Common between roles• Quantify what you do now

• Where to start?

Key areas (BA focus)

• People and Process

• Analysis

• Product

• Technical

Where do we spend our time?

Tools

• Excel

• Of course!

WHY 155?

Here’s what it looks like

• Each person created a spreadsheet

• Why 155?

• Filled in for what we spend time on and want to spend time on

• Extracted into powerpoint to visualise results

The parts..

• Alignment• Non-alignment

Putting it all together...

Skills Graph

Extending to a team

• Can we overlay different people’s graphs?

• What if all the team members had a graph

• Just a matter of numbers right..

• Would this result in a well rounded team?

Overlay the graphs

• A well rounded team?

Outcomes

• Career plan discussions

• Able to identify areas for growth

• Are you doing what you want to do?

What did we learn?

• Huge diversity in the roles

• Open to interpretation, both in completing spreadsheet and viewing

results

• Visual vacuum between current and desired

• Great for collaboration

• Helped people identify career goals and directions

ITS GETTING PERSONAL

WHERE TO NEXT?

Where to next?

• Discussed extensions

• Could it be generalised across other areas e.g. devs, QA

• Does every role have as many facets to it

• Compress to X attributes per key area

• Everyone could have a profile

• Extend to other areas of the business

• Take over the world!

CONCLUSIONS

Conclusion

• Great for collaboration

• Built relationships

• Identify what you do and where you want to go

• Visualise career goals

• Experimented and iterated

Conclusion

• It is not desirable to measure a team like this

• Objectifies people

• Misses the dynamics of the team

• May remove space for people to grow as all skills covered

• Would people be “selected” for team - What happened to self selection?

• Very personal – admitting where you want to go

It was a very interesting ….

EXPERIMENT!

Want to try it?

http://bit.ly/MeasureTeam

• Janet McLean - @janetemclean• Paul Matthews - @pmforpm• MYOB - @myob @myob_geek• MYOB Tech Blog - https://underthehood.myob.com/• Careers page - http://myob.com.au/careers

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