Heidi Helfand on Dynamic Reteaming

• 0:20 Introductions
• 0:32 In agile we expect requirements to change and processes to change but expect the team not to change
• 0:44 Team change is real – we might as well get good at it
• 0:54 People come and go from teams all the time for many different reasons
• 1:00 Experience being in a startups that grew from 10 people to over 600, in those environments team change is constant
• 1:53 There are skills that you can learn to get good at reteaming
• 2:10 Interviewing people from many organisations to identify patterns
• 2:25 Patterns include growth, layoffs and attrition, new work, personal reasons
• 2:57 Onboarding techniques
• 3:32 How not to bring someone new into a team
• 3:40 What happens when people leave the team
• 4:25 A missing level in Tuckman’s model of team formation – Stagnating, when you keep a team together for too long
• 4:49 Techniques to build social bonds beyond the single team level to prevent constant forming/storming
• 5:03 Using the concepts of “tribes” to cultivate relationships which go beyond the single team
• 5:15 The need to build baseline social relationships which span teams
• 5:35 Do things to mix up the people so the greater group gets to know each other, which makes switching teams less of a big deal
• 5:48 The rate of reteaming is a business decision based on the context and needs of the organisation at the time
• 6:18 Load-balancing to absorb new people without overwhelming existing teams
• 6:46 Ensure new people have mentors to help them come into the organisation and/or the team smoothly and have a sense of belonging
• 6:58 Different techniques are applicable to different types of changes
• 7:22 There are techniques for when people leave
• 7:42 The need to have a more humanistic approach to layoffs and redundancies
• 8:08 Techniques to bring people together and form completely new teams
• 8:33 Distributed teams are a reality for many workplaces
• 8:48 Techniques to bring remote members into an existing team
• 9:12 Be as inclusive as possible to ensure remote team members don’t feel left out
• 9:45 Using video technology to ensure the remote team members are “present” with the team
• 10:05 Realign timing of events and ceremonies to include the remote team member(s)
• 10:45 Sometimes when teams change, it really feels like a new team – this might need renaming and other initiation ceremonies to set the new team up for success
• 11:14 The techniques we deploy to make reteaming easier depend on the scope of the reteaming
• 11:27 Keeping culture consistent as the teams change, particularly when the change is growth driven
• 12:02 Acknowledging our history and our past – telling the team story to communicate the culture
• 12:20 The timeline technique to make significant events visible
• 13:25 Team split/mitosis can be very emotional for those involved, particularly when the original team was the first team in the organisation
• 14:22 The healthy tension between the old and the new, what was and what the new teams will be
• 14:40 The book is available on Leanpub

Mentioned:

• Agile 2017
• Experience Report
• Tuckman’s model of team formation
• Book: Dynamic Reteaming
• Book: Coaching for Performance
• Patrick Lencioni
• Book: Liftoff
• Rachel Davies