(Re-)building teams

[Dick]

Hello fellow Atlassians,

Most of you are in a team, agile or otherwise. Each member has his/her role and expertise, you know how to help each other out and pick up the most diverse problems seamlessly making use of the skillsets of the different team members. 

But this wasn't always so... Remember the first day your team was put together, or the first day you and maybe a fellow colleague was added to the team.  

I'm curious as to what approaches could be taken to transform a group of people into an agile team. How the raindrops were transformed into the lake of joint knowledge, seamlessly flowing to the ocean. 

Share your story, so others can benefit.

[Dick]

As not to mess-up the question:

We were two teams that hardly knew one-another. We were tasked to clear small trees from a stretch of heather in the nearby national park. The physical work demanded teamwork to get the job done. We started with the small stuff, but in the end, we were taking on the bigger trees. This joint adventure gave us months of time to break the ice, getting to know each other properly, transforming from loose sand into this nice team.  

[Stephen_Lugton]

I have a number of ways that I use when we have new teams set up  or people join a team.

The first of these is the daily stand up, when someone new joins the team we extend the length of the stand up and when each person gives their update they start off by introducing themselves and giving a little bit of background into what they do.

Next we have our team charter and ways of working, I use these as part of the onboarding process where I talk through with people who are new to agile what agile is and why we use it, I then run through the team charter and how we work whilst also showing them how to use our agile toolset e.g. Jira and Confluence.

Thirdly I add in ice breaker questions to the retrospectives to give everyone a chance to reveal something about themselves in a safe environment, it only has to be little things but just something not work related.

We also pair new team members with a more experienced team member to get them into how we work etc.

I run monthly brown bag lunch sessions where someone from the team shares what they're working on, especially when it will involve a change to our ways of working so that people have a chance to engage, for instance I'm updating some of our change management processes so that we can standardise between technical and non-technical teams so I will be doing a brown bag session to show how the approvals part of that process is being simplified.

And finally we try to encourage social engagement as much as possible; currently the company is offering free buffet lunches so those team members who come into the office get a chance to have lunch together without additional costs.

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These steps were not all in place when I joined the company; my manager had been promoted and was leaving the department, so his onboarding to me was 10 minutes of him saying "You need to go and learn about this, this and this.  Talk to the team they can tell you who you need to talk to."  At least the project manager who had been looking after the work while I was being recruited said hello and showed me what software I needed, and where the Jira boards were.  But then he said "I'm on leave from tomorrow, the stand up starts at 9:15. you're running it"

[Dick]

Thank you Stephen, for sharing your approaches. 

That must've been quite the learning curve when you joined the company. At least you were thrown off the deep end in stead of under a bus. You managed to float! And from the top part of your response I have a solid impression, it sure triggered ideas to make things better regarding the onboarding process at your company.