The Heart of Your Liftoff

You’ve laid the foundation for a successful liftoff by beginning well. The next phase of work begins: choosing the right group processes for your liftoff to promote teamwork.

Agile Chartering

We could’ve written an entire book about agile chartering; it’s that important. In brief, agile chartering is a lightweight documentation approach to creating initial understandings and agreements about the product and the work. It includes how the team intends to reach desired outcomes. Include agile chartering as one of the topics in your design flow. You’ll find more detail about this in Chapter 4, ​Smooth the Path to Performance with Agile Chartering​.

Design Principle

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Every work group and team needs agile chartering. It accelerates common understandings. Sooner or later, team members and the business wrestle with defining the work in the same way. Including chartering in the liftoff gains understanding early and precludes time wasted later on.

Skills Training

Liftoff designers typically include training in a boot camp--style liftoff that stretches over days or weeks. The liftoff offers an ideal time for skills training; the decision about whether to include it depends on what the team needs. Consider what skills it’ll need in a knowledge-work setting. If the members need technical skills, do they have them? Do they know how to learn and collaborate as a team? Training together builds shared focus and practices.

Different groups might need different types of training. As part of designing the liftoff, request suggestions for training topics. Ask managers, Scrum masters, agile coaches, and team members. Ask people who’ve worked on similar or related efforts. Remember to focus on flow (see ​Focus on Flow​) and plan for easily consumable, bite-sized pieces. Don’t go overboard with training in a liftoff. Include just enough to get the team started, and plan for more later on, as needed.

If your team or business people are unfamiliar with agile methods, you can include an Agile 101 training session. Then introduce everyone to the practices and common language of agile. You’ll find these trainings more relevant during an agile adoption, for example.

You might want to focus training on single practices that you want to include or improve. Practice skills might include user stories—writing, sizing, and estimating (or not)—or test-driven development. You might also have training sessions on new development languages, new technologies, or tools. Other common training topics include leading effective retrospectives or decision-making for teams. Your team’s history and the work will guide your choices.

If you plan to include training as part of the liftoff, include the trainers in planning. Arrangements for training will have an impact on facilities requirements, duration, and scheduling activities.

Design Principle

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Take the time to include participants in design decisions. You’ll get a better liftoff outcome if you ask for and include their opinions. Seek ideas about training topics, planning needs, and other uses of their time.

Real-Time Planning

Sometimes planners choose to include real-time planning as an element of their liftoffs. Real-time planning might include team assignments, backlog development, release planning, or first-iteration planning. Other times they might handle these in a step just before or right after the liftoff.

A liftoff offers an attractive occasion to address all kinds of planning issues. All the stakeholders are together, and it’s tempting to take advantage of that. Including planning as an element of the liftoff makes the whole event longer. Yet, holding planning sessions together can inspire creativity. Product managers and teams can work together to identify minimum marketable features (MMFs) for the backlog, or the timing of production releases. You’ll determine whether the trade-offs are worthwhile.

Three books can help provide more product-clarification activities:

Your liftoff might involve more than one team. Set aside time for each team to meet separately for its planning. Schedule time for teams to exchange planning details and discuss their pieces of the bigger picture. Everyone can look at the parts and the whole to see how they all fit together, or if they need adjusting.

Team Building

You gain team development just by holding a liftoff. You’ll want to strike a balance between team-building activities and more task-focused liftoff topics. Review the answers you gathered in response to the planning questions in ​Planning the Liftoff​. Decide the right amount (and what kinds) of team building to include.

Team-building activities can range from simple getting-acquainted exercises to elaborate simulations to team self-selection. You can find many books, websites, and other resources devoted to team-building activities. Everyone has their favorites. Ask your colleagues about what’s worked well for them. We’ve used many books for ideas, including the following:

Before choosing team-building activities, think carefully about the liftoff participants. What’s unique about their cultures, their needs, and what they’ll tolerate? You want the participants to stretch themselves, but not to the point of panicking or feeling overwhelmed.

Teams tell us their agile chartering discussions acted as a powerful team-building experience. A Scrum master once reported, “We were just a group of individuals with different skills when we came to the liftoff. After chartering, we’re a team!”

Lean Coffee

It’s not a lean thing, nor do you have to drink coffee. Lean Coffee[4] is another activity that can serve as the whole meeting or as a part of a longer meeting.

To begin a Lean Coffee, participants think of topics relevant to the meeting theme and write each on a sticky note. They briefly describe their topics to the whole group. Then, everyone uses dots to show interest in a few topics. Someone arranges the sticky notes according to the number of dots, and the group begins discussing the highest-priority topic. The facilitator, or a volunteer, keeps time. Each topic gets five to ten minutes initially. When time is up, the group uses thumb voting. Thumbs up means continue with the topic for a few minutes longer. Thumbs down means move on to a new topic. Thumbs sideways means I’ll do whatever the rest of the group wants.

Open Space Technology

Harrison Owen first described Open Space Technology (OST)[5] in 1985. OST is a way to organize meetings. With OST, groups of all sizes (from 2 to 2000+) self-organize, create an agenda, and solve complex problems in a relatively short time. Launching a new product and starting a new team are exactly the sorts of complex puzzles it’s designed for.

Open Space meetings provide a format for your liftoff group to work together, or swarm, on an issue. Individuals propose topics. Small subgroups get together to discuss the topics and plan actions. Open Space mimics the self-organizing nature of agile teamwork. It gets the team started on the work and strengthens collaboration.

An experienced Open Space facilitator helps set the tone for your meeting. The facilitator can also coach a newer facilitator in the method. The Agile Alliance[6] sponsors the Agile Open Program as a resource. The program supports local and regional conferences that use an Open Space format. People organize such conferences around the world and throughout the year. Attend an Agile Open conference to experience it for yourself.

Social Events

Socializing provides a welcome counterpoint for your participants. It balances the intense content work of liftoff. Offer a meal together. Arrange a non--work-related group activity. Time away from the main focus gives individuals time to process topics and content. They’ll return fresher to the work. Socializing also offers another way to do team building. People get to know one another better through social engagement.

Mary Lynn Manns and Linda Rising describe an influencing pattern in their book, More Fearless Change: Strategies for Making Your Ideas Happen. [MR15] They suggest, “Make an ordinary gathering a special event by including food.”

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