Team Capital Vocabulary
Well-Formed Team (WFT) - A disciplined, self-empowered, change-tolerant team that rapidly delivers business value. Characteristics displayed by well-formed teams include:
- Adherence to Lean and Agile principles (references)
- Behavior as a complex adaptive system, converging to business solutions utilizing feedback loop that is tightly coupled with business vision
- Defined, repeatable and enforceable structure that allows the team to
- regularly perform self-retrospection
- keep all work visible
- minimize the work in progress
- architect, design and code “just for today”
- keep quality high by focusing on automated validation of completed product
- Passion, exhibited by:
- Celebration & Identity (WFT’s will converge to their own identity, including team symbols, celebration rituals, and traditions)
- Visible, evangelical satisfaction by product managers, business sponsors, and team members.
- Satisfied employees who feel that each day’s work helps move the company closer to its vision, because each task undertaken has a clear line-of-sight to a needed business capability
- Employees who place team success as their highest priority and sense of accomplishment
- Hyper-productivity (defined below)
Hyper-Productive - Is 4 times industry accepted averages for performance.
One source for this definition is Jeff Sutherland (CTO of PatientKeeper, and co-inventor of Scrum) defines hyper-productivity to be demonstrable productivity at sustained rates that are at least 4 times the industry average. WFT’s have been observed to create product at sustainable rates of 10 times the industry average.*Note: we should pull in some other data for this. maybe psp
Team Swarm - Focusing a WFT’s collective energy on solving each and every task. WFT’s automatically govern the amount of work in progress by synchronizing daily to ensure that the team is focused on as few tasks as possible. The team’s commitment is focused daily on completing as many related tasks as possible utilizing paired-programming, real-time communication and group problem solving. In lean terms, the team is constantly aware of minimizing backlogs of work to prevent waste. Observing a collocated WFT in an open, collaborative area will reveal a noisy, busy, active group of people, working together at several terminals, reacting to real-time communication. Paired programming results in real-time code inspection, and overheard conversations provide many valuable opportunities for code refactoring.
Teamlet - The smallest possible team size that could work. 2-3 people working in a high raport are the smallest sustainable unit for a team. A teamlet offer each member the critical feedback to build ideas rapidly and marturely. They help the market place of ideas work in a meritocracy fashion but, better than normal by making the market work fast.