How to Choose the One for Your Agile Project

We have seen a growing number of organizations adapting Agile approach for their projects. When forming an ideal team for the agile team, the leadership will turn to the recognized stars on the team to build a SWAT team for the future endeavor.

The limitation to the method of delegation is that the recognized stars may end up being pulled from things that have strong connections with. As a result, even though the recognized star would like to devote all their time and focus on the Agile team, other teams are likely to reach out again and ask for help in formal and/or informal manners. In the end, the recognized stars may undertake multiple tasks and excessive amount of meetings and deliverables that require their participation, which leads to delay of the Agile project.

Take real life example: someone may be skillful and have a great relationship with the people he/she is working with. The team values the opinion and skills of his/hers so much, that they start to add more agile tasks to that person. Although he/she is supposed to focus on the agile tasks, other team members may have questions around the areas that he/she previously worked on. Therefore, emails, meetings are all forwarded to that person for insights or even directly help in creating deliverables. The person with great sense of responsibility and willingness to support the team may end up handling more workstreams than he/she should. Thus, the person get streched thin and unhappy about overwork. Moreover, affect the timeline of deliverables for each tasks with his/her involvement.

Is there a study/ tool that enables to the team to systematically identify the suitable person to take an agile project? The answer is yes. Staff the team with hidden stars who are less packed with workload and yet still have a great connection with the people and resource. The hidden stars are lower profile at the organization yet have enough knowledge of the vision, skills and organization. In addition, as they are less expected to follow the tradition, they are more open to explore new approaches and ideas throughout the project.

Identify highly connected potential resources is also crucial to the success of agile project. the organization should identify “broker”, “central connector”, and “domain experts” and make sure that these team members are fully understanding and supporting the agile project. Because they are capable of providing the suitable resources, knowledge of the subject and support for the agile project.

Lastly, it is also beneficial to leverage the effective tool to identify such talents and their connections to others. Organizational Network Analysis (ONA) can be adopted with the help with commercialized tools developed by Microsoft and TrustSphere. With the analysis of the emails, meeting schedules and surveys, the ONA tool is able to present a view of the organizational connections between individuals and departments. Identifying the gaps, and strong connections where collaboration can be established, and who are the people that are underutilized.

Reference: https://hbr.org/2021/03/for-an-agile-transformation-choose-the-right-people