I will be speaking at Innovate 2012 on the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Agile Teams®. The session will be held on Monday, June 4th, 2012, between 3-4pm in "Southern I" @ the Disney Dolphin Hotel.   I'd like to share my presentation's topic and start a conversation before, during and after the conference.  Let's have innovate all year-round with passionate, smart, agile professionals like yourself!

   

It is my experience that Agile teams are highly effective when individuals can make a paradigm shift in their thinking and can adopt the agile values and principles.  A habit according to Stephen Covey is the "intersection of knowledge, skill and desire".  Understanding the Agile rules are easy, mastering agile is a journey that usually takes a few years or more.  Many teams believe they are agile just because they follow practices like creating a product backlog, holding daily meetings, working in 2 or 4 week iterations and producing a product increment.  A paradigm is the way in which we "see" the world -- not in terms of sight, but in perceiving, understanding and interpreting.  A new level of thinking, based on the principles that accurately describe the agile paradigm, is required to become highly effective. 
 
After a team is able to adopt the Agile paradigm, the next stage to becoming a highly effective team is to make habits of the right set of agile practices to employ just enough rules to support autonomy while avoiding chaos, establishing a rhythm to maintain momentum and synchronize efforts, acting supportively and transparently to cultivate trust and respect, and exchanging ideas to realize the benefits of diverse skills.  Since there are no set standards for agile, what exactly are the habits and practices that are essential for high performing teams? Come learn and contribute in a highly interactive session with agile practioners like yourself. 

 

How you can participate?
Let's start a conversation here, by posting comments to this blog, about highly effective agile teams.  Here are a few questions I thought we could use to spark a good dialogue (or add  any random thought that comes to mind):
  

1. Please share your "aha" moment when you made the paradigm shift to Agile and what helped get your there.  What were some of impediments on your agile journey?
2. How did you deal with individuals on your team who were resistant to the agile paradigm?  What did you learn from this experience?
3. What are some of the habits that have made your team more effective?  What are some anti-patterns?
4. What are the agile practices your team follows that helps it perform better?
5. Do you agree that following agile practices alone does not make a team agile?
6. What parts of your organization are not agile and how does that impact your team's effectiveness