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Heidi Helfand on Dynamic Reteaming

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In this podcast recorded at Agile 2017, Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, spoke to Heidi Helfand about Dynamic Reteaming

Key Takeaways

  • Team change is real – we might as well get good at it
  • People come and go from teams all the time for many different reasons
  • A missing level in Tuckman’s model of team formation – Stagnating, when you keep a team together for too long  
  • There are techniques to build social bonds beyond the single team level to prevent constant forming/storming when team composition changes
  • The rate of reteaming is a business decision based on the context and needs of the organisation at the time
  • 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

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