The Tuckman's Team Performance stages

 

As program managers, project managers, scrum masters, or agile coaches we need to constantly work with teams and help them effectively work together quickly.

Social and Psychological skills which include self-awareness, Empathy & Emotional Intelligence play a vital role in building high-performing teams. Every time we bring new people together to work on a project, we create a new team but just because they are one team doesn’t mean those folks are working as a team.

Everyone wants to be part of high-performing teams and lead them, but these teams do not appear magically. Leaders need to work towards creating efficient teams.

Last year I had a chance to be an agile coach for a few teams, the team composition was 60% existing staff and 40% new staff. In this article, I'll share the application of certain techniques, learnings, and observations.

 The goal I set for myself was to get them to high performing team in 3 months and some of them were already between Storming and Norming state. But I saw them oscillating between Forming & Storming often and we missed consistency.

 Going to the basics was my next step, I planned to get these teams to the Performing state and created a few action items so I could serve the team to get to the Performing state.

While My BHAG was” To get these teams to Performing state in 3 months”, I had to face many challenges as I was also new to the whole team dynamics. The biggest hurdle was to build trust and that took a long time, I had a feeling I might fail but my Emotional quotient, my commitment to fulfill people's promises, empathy towards teams, open communication, and being vulnerable by sharing my fears and slowing down helped me build trust with teams (at least with most of them 😊).

 

The Tuckman model describes four phases that squads go through as they form a team to deliver organizational goals. In the below table, I’ve documented a series of steps that were taken to promote the whole team to the next level.

This may not be a recipe that you could take and execute as is, I will suggest making modifications to the below content based on your team dynamics and environment.

Some of the benefits of Having High-Performance Teams are High morale of the employees and Increased client satisfaction.

I would like to know your opinions and thoughts on my observations and share how I could have pivoted to get faster results.

Product Managers knife to derive and organize Product Increment

Product Managers knife to derive and organize Product Increment

I would like to start with a question. Have you felt frozen, do you procrastinate, panic, get overwhelmed or have felt completely lost by looking at the amount of decisions and tasks which needs to get done by a specific time.

Every one of us face this situation you be in the role of Students, Scientists, Scholars, Researchers, Politicians,  Authors, Project Managers, etc. I'll discuss this from the perspective of Product Managers as I work with them closely and have lived through various product launches, Product Managers are under constant pressure to deliver value in VUCA environment. 

Need not to mention but  Product managers are the foundations of progressive and new edge organizations and they are rewarded by the value created by the crafted product served to the customers in increments and some of the successful product managers have learned the art of dealing this complexity of delivering value to customers in slices, each slice satisfies the customer need.

In-cases when product managers have fair idea of the end product and business case is available it is likely that a thick requirement document is supplied to team who then could pull work for development. Usually in an environment of large and complex product development: multiple tasks and decisions have to be taken by various stakeholders including product managers, project managers and team and they may get stuck and overwhelmed. To deal with this situation product managers and business analysts slice and dice the work in Salami slices  (features/stories) for development team.

These development Salami slices are of various thickness and they should not be sliced and diced in a food processor (at one go with equal size), once each byte of a single Salami is consumed and feedback loop is completed, Product Managers adjust the outcome and are ready for slicing the next Salami slice (feature/ user story), which produces another potential shippable increment. 

Rule 1: Never break your work upfront in equal slices 

Customer feedback loop is plugged along with each slice of delivery and the whole loop only gets completed when the process of Consumption of outcome, Gather experiences, Learn insights and application of feedback is completed. 

Once customer feedback loop is plugged into the process, the original requirement (the original unfinished work - unfinished Salami roll) is transformed into new Salami Slice which is an outcome of MVP and customer feedback actions. This process results in the value creation for all related stakeholders.

Rule 2: Each slice of your work must be plugged along with customer feedback loop, usually a standard documented practice in organizations.

These series of Nano wins build a momentum of series of success which in-turn results in motivation, empowerment, happiness and success across the eco system.

To Conclude

This techniques is one among the popular technique to divide and concur a mammoth task. Swiss Cheese method and Salami Slice method are other popular methods to eat an elephant one byte at a time. These techniques are generally applied for efficient use of time management and is effective in managing product backlog and increments 

Agile Coaches and Scrum Masters must educate, collaborate and work with Product Owners, Product Managers and Enterprise Architects to effectively utilize the time.

History of Salami Slice

Salami slicing tactics, also known as salami slicing, salami tactics, the salami-slice strategy, or salami attacks,^[1] is a divide and conquer process of threats and alliances used to overcome opposition. With it, an aggressor can influence and eventually dominate a landscape, typically political, piece by piece. 

Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salami_slicing_tactics