In Practice: Team Restart

We first met Chris Sterling and Brent Barton when they worked as senior consultant and CTO, respectively, at a company in Seattle. Together they formed and sold a startup. Both have gone on to perform exceptional work for other organizations. In this story, Chris and Brent describe a liftoff with an unusual purpose that took place after the work began. The pair planned a liftoff to restructure several teams that contributed to the same product line. As you read the story, watch for the critical role the facilitators played in attending to human dynamics as the event unfolded.

Their experience illustrates several outcomes of an effective liftoff. Everyone heard others’ perspectives and concerns. Team members understood that managers valued their input. Their suggestions were part of the final solution. In the long run, the team’s involvement resulted in improved delivery.

Rearranging the Teams

While working with a software development organization to support their adoption of agile methods across ten teams and three separate products, we came into a situation where management wanted to rearrange the team configurations for one of the products.

The teams had already run through their first sprint with the initial team configuration. During the first sprint retrospective, the teams identified the need to reconfigure team membership and skill sets to deliver more effectively, as one team was too small and another was too large. Also, some people felt as if they were on the wrong team, considering their interactions with other team members.

The senior manager asked if we could run a kickoff exercise to help with the reconfiguration efforts, and we agreed. Unfortunately, this plan was not communicated to the other managers.

When we got to the next day’s planning meeting, we opened with an exercise to have the teams reconfigure themselves. We asked team members to form new teams based on their sense of the best way to deliver work. We told them that this configuration would be a suggestion to management, but management would have the final call.

As the teams started, the other managers were obviously unhappy with how things were unfolding. They had stayed until 9:00 p.m. after the previous day’s retrospective to reconfigure the teams, and they were not happy that the teams were remaking management decisions.

As the exercise was already under way, we felt it would be wise to continue to allow the teams to reconfigure themselves from an empowerment perspective, and we reminded the managers that they’d have the final call anyhow. We asked the managers to observe the conversations and issues that the teams considered. Many did not like the choices that were being made, which were different from what they had come up with the previous evening. We continued to encourage them not to halt the exercise, which would lead to confusion and disempowerment of the teams.

Feedback from the Team

The team members formed four groups that were all too small given the cross-functional work. We thanked the teams and told them that the managers would use their work as input to the final team configurations.

We went into a breakout room with the managers, who proceeded to rip into us about the entire exercise. After considerable thrashing, the managers started to calm down and move toward what to do from this point forward.

After looking at what the teams had come up with, we observed that the teams were largely the same as the management team’s original recommendations. Not only that, the managers’ plan actually solved the problem of having four teams that were all too small. Once the entire group of managers realized this, we decided to present the managers’ plan to the teams.

The feedback from the team members was about 80 percent the same as the managers’ thinking. They provided additional insights as well. Team members suggested moving several people to form three teams that were appropriately sized to work cross-functionally. The entire group was asked if they thought this was a good solution and if they could commit to it moving forward. Everyone agreed.

We then went into multiteam sprint planning from a single product backlog for all three teams. The second sprint planning session with the new team configurations was significantly more effective and shorter than the first session. The teams worked as though they had been together for a long time and moved through differences in opinion quickly. Over the next few months, these teams took more and more responsibility and accountability for their work and delivered effectively sprint over sprint.