Fluid Scrum Teams and 6 Conditions for Team Effectiveness
Are Fluid Scrum Teams Really Effective? Let’s find out!
Are Fluid Scrum Teams Really Effective? Let’s find out!
We can learn a lot from the results of decades of research of Ruth Wageman and Richard Hackman of Harvard University, the 6 Conditions for Team Effectiveness:
You should have a real team
You need the right people
You should have a compelling purpose
You need a sound structure
You want to have a supportive context
You wish to see team coaching
Below is a visualisation of these success conditions.
When you embrace Agile ways of working, like Scrum, these 6 conditions will surely resonate with you. They tick all the boxes of a typical Agile team: stable self-organizing, cross-functional teams that work on a common goal while receiving the support and coaching to achieve these goals. You can even argue they confirm the essence of Agile and Scrum. This is remarkable since the research was done completely out of the context of Agile, and outside of software development.
But what about Fluid Scrum Teams? A few months back I discussed Fluid Scrum Teams and how this presents the team with additional options to create valuable products in a complex environment. On the face of it, this concept doesn’t appear to be in sync with the 6 Conditions for Team Effectiveness. But there’s more to it than meets the eye.
A brief introduction to Fluid Scrum Teams
As an introduction or a reminder, here’s a summary of how Fluid Scrum Teams work.
Fluid Scrum Teams organize themselves based on the work at hand. Every time new topics need to be addressed, the members of the Fluid Scrum Teams organize themselves to optimize the chances to succeed with their challenges.
The larger pool of team members is stable and cohesive. They typically are more than 10 people. Maybe even up to 50. They form smaller teams each Sprint to maximize their effectiveness.
For more on the topic, you can find the introductory article here.
Fluid Scrum Teams and 6 Conditions for Team Effectiveness
Let’s now discuss how the 6 conditions apply to Fluid Scrum Teams.
1. The Essentials — Compelling Purpose
Effective teams are goal-oriented and self-managing. The members of the Fluid Scrum Teams all work towards the same Product Goal, the desired future state of the product. Based upon this Product Goal, the Product Owner proposes several Sprint Goals.
After agreeing on Sprint Goals the team will pursue, they self-manage to organize themselves around them. They will form several smaller subteams for the duration of the Sprint. These subteams will commit to their Sprint Goal and find their own best way to achieve it.
The compelling goals form the team’s focus and commitment. They are the driving force for the teams. Self-management is a key element for the success of Fluid Scrum Teams.
2. The Essentials — Right People
Scrum is all about cross-functional teams. You want to have all the skills in your team to create and sustain your product. But there’s also the restriction of size. The Scrum Guide says teams can’t be more than 10 people, preferably even smaller.
This small team size may limit you from having all the skills to achieve your goals. How could you possibly cover the complete value stream of a product with a team of 3 to 10? Another factor is complexity. How do you know your small team has all the skills for the challenges to come? After all, what will happen is unknown.
The pool of people of Fluid Scrum Teams is bigger. So you have a higher chance of having all skills of your value stream and a better chance to respond to the unknown. Fluid Scrum Teams have this condition covered.
3. The Essentials — Real Team
A real team is bounded. This means it is an interdependent social system. It is clear who is in the team and who is not. The people know each other really well and work well together. Fluid Scrum Teams have a bounded (larger) team as a base.
A real team should also be stable. Teams that work for a longer period together show a higher chance of achieving success than teams that just started. The pool of people of Fluid Scrum Teams can just as well be stable as a smaller Scrum team.
Another finding is that the most successful teams were found to be of size 5–6. This is a sweet spot for team size. The pool of people that form Fluid Scrum Teams is bigger. So this team would not meet this condition of team effectiveness.
However, the pool of people organizes itself into smaller subteams every Sprint. When they work towards the goal, they are working in small teams. I think this is key. They can even use the conditions for effectiveness to ensure the subteams are around 5 to 6 people.
The alternative for a pool of people of the Fluid Scrum Teams is having multiple autonomous teams all working on the same product. While these autonomous teams have the same Product Goal and meet at the Sprint Review, they are still multiple separate teams, creating and sustaining one product. I argue it’s better to have one team committing to a shared goal than having multiple separate teams doing this.
4. The Enablers — Sound structure
The pool of people is a team that benefits from having clear roles, a clear decision-making process, norms and team agreements. They also should work together to achieve their goals. Clear roles, a decision-making process, norms and team agreements apply regardless. However, Fluid Scrum Teams have a better opportunity to work together, as I also described when I tackled Real Team.
Other aspects of a sound structure are autonomy and proper and timely feedback on how they work towards their goals. Fluid Scrum Teams have a large degree of autonomy and have this feedback loop ingrained as they work with Scrum.
5. and 6. The Enablers — Supportive Context and Team Coaching
I discuss the last two enabling factors together. They always apply, regardless of whether you work with Fluid Scrum Teams or not.
Supportive context is about topics like education, sufficient resources, and proper rewards.
The research behind the 6 conditions shows coaching is more important than managing. Well-timed coaching has a significant impact. Coaching teams that are already in favourable conditions is more effective than coaching teams that aren’t in this condition.
Fluid Scrum Teams are fully aligned with the 6 Conditions for Team Effectiveness
The 6 Conditions for Team Effectiveness help us to predict how successful our teams will be. They are very much aligned with the rules of Scrum on team composition, structure and decision power.
At first glance, this appears to not be the case with Fluid Scrum teams. This is especially the case with the condition ‘Real Team’. After all, a team should be small and stable. Fluid Scrum Teams are … fluid. And the pool of team members is typically between 15 and 50 people.
But if you look more closely, you will notice that a larger team can be perfectly stable. They can work together for a longer period. I myself have been part of such a large team multiple times. The division into smaller teams felt unnatural in those cases. The larger group of people was a real team that shouldn’t have been forcibly split into so-called autonomous, but isolated teams.
The size conditions (the ideal size is 5 to 6 people) also apply to Fluid Scrum Teams. The pool of people organizes into smaller teams each Sprint. They can even use this finding from the research to find the ideal-sized Fluid Scrum Team for the Sprint.
Many of the Conditions for Team Effectiveness are amplified with Fluid Scrum Teams. Fluid Scrum Teams have more options to achieve a higher sense of purpose, to have the right people and a sound structure than multiple autonomous teams working towards the same goal.