Roles and Responsibilities: Agile Teams
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) stands as a beacon of organization-wide agility, offering a structured and proven approach to scaling Agile practices. At the heart of this transformative framework lies a critical element – Agile Teams.
What is an Agile Team?
Think of Agile Teams as the building blocks of innovation, the engines that power the delivery of value in a dynamic and collaborative environment. An Agile Team is a cross-functional group of typically ten or fewer individuals with all the skills necessary to define, build, test, and deliver value to their customer.
Agile teams are cross functional, self-organizing and self-managing and are accountable for delivering results that meet the needs and expectations of their customers and stakeholders.
Roles and Responsibilities of Agile Team
The ultimate purpose of every ART is to deliver effective solutions to the customer. The following figure shows the critical areas of responsibility of an ART.
First Responsibility: Connecting with the Customer
The first responsibility can be further explained with the following sub-set responsibilities.
1. Build empathy with the Customer
To build a great product for the customer, the team needs to think like the customer. There are many ways to do that, including:
- Leveraging the Product Owners’ skills, knowledge, and responsibilities
- Establishing direct communication with the customer
- Participating in solution support
- Direct observation of the customer in action
- Implementing solution telemetry to monitor usage
Agile teams also spend time developing and understanding their primary user personas— and their needs, struggles, and opportunities for improvement.
2. Participate in product definition
Agile team members leverage their knowledge of customer personas to create user stories and acceptance criteria. The teams create stories that fulfill that vision, as led by the Product Owner (PO).
3. Design and execute experiments
Agile teams, as part of the customer and solution research execute and review the results of various experiments. They implement research spikes, low-fidelity models and prototypes to gain fast feedback.
Second Responsibility: Planning the Work
1. ART Planning
PI Planning is the event where each Agile Team gains alignment with the rest of the train and creates their backlog for the upcoming PI. As a result of PI Planning, the team creates a set of PI Objectives and a story-level outline of the planned progression of their work across iterations. This seeds the Team Backlog for the upcoming PI.
2. Team Planning
Agile teams perform short-term planning on a regular basis during the PI. The purpose of this planning is to leverage new learnings and plan the next short increment of value.
3. Refining the Team Backlog
The backlog is used to identify and prioritize the upcoming work. As knowledge emerges, teams continuously refresh and refine the backlog.
Third Responsibility: Delivering Value
1. Frequently integrate and test
A fast rhythm of development requires frequent integration and testing. This helps uncover technology and implementation problems early and gives the teams enough time to respond to the findings.
2. Regularly synchronize with the rest of the train
While executing the PI, an agile team has multiple checkpoints in the form of Coaches Sync and PO Sync. These events create visibility into the progress toward current PI objectives and help the ART make timely adjustments.
3. Build the continuous delivery pipeline
An effective Agile development process also depends on a continuous delivery pipeline. This typically requires value stream mapping to identify sources of delay and excessive variability.
4. Release Frequently
Some teams are able to release directly to the customer. These teams may—typically in collaboration with some specialized teams or Shared Services—establish their own release process. Decisions on when to release value are typically made at different levels: major releases may be decided upon during PI Planning; routine deployments are governed at the iteration level. Others can even be event-driven.
Fourth Responsibility: Getting Feedback
1. Find pathways to the Customer
In a large organization, the customer may be many degrees of separation away from the Agile team that creates value. The Product Owner serves as a local customer proxy and can be instrumental in helping the team establish the right connections to obtain direct customer feedback. System Demos are one productive venue for customer feedback.
2. Frequently validate technical concerns
A team must continually validate the assumptions behind the solution architecture and the implementation strategy. Technology feedback comes from frequent integration, testing, and deployment.
Fifth Responsibility: Improving Relentlessly
1. Run routine improvement events
Agile teams participate in a joint Inspect & Adapt event with leaders whose help can be crucial in establishing and implementing necessary corrective action.
2. Improve some things immediately
Some problems should be addressed as they occur, without waiting for the next improvement event. Addressing issues as they emerge is an integral part of a culture of continuous improvement.
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