An Agile team is a team of 5 to 11 members who go beyond their periphery of software developers who define, built, test, and deliver the product within a small time box. A highly qualified SAFe concepts agile team delivers exceptional results irrespective of the challenges they have to face. Agile prefers that the collection of the smaller team will deliver better quality as it’s hard in swift communication for larger teams.
An agile team can mainly be divided into two types
A technical team who define built and deploy the project value and
A business team that supports technical members by providing, infrastructure, legal guidance, marketing, end-user training, etc.
The agile team is considered as the powerhouse of the organization and no agile release train can be completed without them. They are the self-organized and self-managed team differing the team from the traditional teams.
Characteristics of Agile team structure
Cross functional Team- Agile team members have their own specific skill set. An agile team is a cross-functional working towards a single goal. The team is fully skilled within themselves that they don’t need any external supports for developing the deliverable value.
Collaborative- The team collaborates and communicates at various stages. The team and members can work parallel with the other team members and have cross-training to learn a new skill set.
Non Hierarchical- Agile team is non-hierarchical giving every member independence to work and organize themselves. The agile team has roles and responsibilities but they are not burdened with unnecessary management.
The agile team has its share of well-defined roles and responsibilities which include scrum master, and product owners which is explained in our other article in detail.
The responsibilities of the agile team are:
Responsibilities fulfilled by the Technical team
Collaborate to update used stories and acceptance criteria.
Creating, deploy and commit to iteration planning and Objectives by participating in PI planning.
Complete frequent reviews
With help of architectural guidelines develop technical design related to their skilled areas.
Carry research, design, prototype, and other related activities.
Ensure implementation and integration of changes.
Create new feasible features, integrate and test them.
Deploy the solution
Support operational business
Continuously create the team's progress.
Responsibilities fulfilled by the Business team
Understand and address the business opportunity
Collaborate with the technical team and define objectives
Define business process and operation values with the technical team
In unique work, products ensure iteration and adaptive practices.
Work promptly by taking feedback from customers and stakeholders.
Adapt lean-agile principles in practices.
The four-team arrangement in an agile team will provide the idea of an organized and created model of an agile team.
Stream Aligned Team
In this way, the team is organized in a stream of work. In this way, the team can deliver value quickly, safely, and independently as they don’t need any support from other teams. The main benefit of this is that every member is directly connected to the customer making the alignment customer-centric. Stream aligned team support a part of development value stream having one of the below aspects as never a single stream can develop an entire solution.
Specific solution
Feature set
Specific customer personality
Steps in the customer journey
Specific Business domain
Product innovation
If a stream-aligned team needs to complete the developing value by itself without any support they only need to cross-function making the stream team a long-lived team.
Complicated subsystem team
When a solution is bigger and complex which requires hardware and software systems both then the subsystem is introduced requiring specialist knowledge. This complicated subsystem team is required to build and support only a part of a system which is very complicated and requires a group of specialists to understand and make changes in it.
Such teams have responsibilities as
Building and maintain the complex subsystem.
Maintain a level of expertise by updating themselves
Ensure subsystems are developed at a level of customer requirements
Align subsystem roadmap along with the system roadmap
Develop a user-friendly interface by hiding complex subsystems behind documentation.
Ensure quality and performance.
Platform Team
This team helps stream the aligned team to reduce their load by providing underlying internal services.
Responsibilities of the Platform team are
Built platform
Collaborate with stream alignment team
Focus on easy to use platform
Support and maintaining platforms
Enabling team
Enabling team provides support and training to other teams to acquire new skills and help them to merge with everyday changing technologies. For example system team, which helps the ART team in delivering the pipeline.
The enabling team support and expertise in
Automated Testing
Security
Engineering quality practice
Integration and building tools
Environment and configuration
DevOps implementation
An agile team is a team of members who are completely goal-oriented along with having qualities of self-management, trustworthiness, commitment to a team, and highly skilled.
About Advance Agility
We, at Advance Agility, are the new-age Agile Coaching, Consulting and IT services company. We enable end-to-end Digital Transformation. Agile execution is integral to our being. We are doing SAFe implementation with small, medium and large organization across the globe. Our vision is to be the leading Agile execution player globally. To keep adding value at every process stage. We are on a mission to empower our clients, move from concept to cash in the shortest sustainable lead time by adopting human centric approach to business agility. Embracing the change is in our DNA. Things that keep us apart are Quicker and Seamless execution with End-to-end gamut of services. Our Global presence and Stellar Track Record give us an edge over our competitor.
Connect with us at advanceagility.com to learn about SAFe and SAFe Implementation. Write to us at contact@advanceagilty.com for any agile training or consulting needs. We are always looking for competent agile trainers as well. So if you are a good trainer or want to become one, do get in touch with us to that we can learn, grow and achieve together.
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