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Agile Teams

This category contains topics associated with Agile Teams.  Topics in this category include:

  • Team Conflict and Emotional Intelligence
  • Improving Team Performance
  • Team Roles in Distributed Project Management

Teams in an Agile environment are very different from teams in a traditional plan-driven project environment:

  • They have a much higher level of self-organization and empowerment
  • They are expected to take responsibility for many of the functions that might otherwise be performed by a Project Manager in a traditional plan-driven project environment
  • They operate in a much more fast-paced and dynamic project environment which creates a need for managing team conflict to build effective, high performance teams

The development and testing practices used by teams in an Agile environment are also very different than a typical plan-driven project environment:

  • The role of developers is significantly expanded to include working directly with customer to better understand their requirements, taking responsibility for planning and managing their own tasks, and working effectively with other members of the project team to develop well-integrated solutions
  • The approach for testing is also very different.  Testing is an integral part of the development team rather than being done by a separate and independent organization

Please check the articles associated with this category for more detail:

What Is Distributed Project Management? Why Does it Make Sense?

What Is Distributed Project Management?

“Distributed Project Management” is a new approach to project management.   Here’s a brief overview of what it is all about. What is Distributed Project Management? “Distributed Project Management” is very important to help people see the relationship of “project management” and Agile in a very fresh new perspective.  It has the potential to redefine many […]

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Improving Agile Team Performance – How Do You Improve Team Performance in an Agile Environment?

Improving Team Performance

A number of people have asked questions related to improving team performance in an Agile environment. It takes some skill to do that – “How do you improve team performance in an Agile project?  Improving Agile Team Performance How to Improve Team Performance It is very common for project managers to over-manage teams and I

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How Do You Develop and Improve Emotional Intelligence?

Who Gets Blamed When an Agile Project Fails?

I recently created a significant training module on Agile Leadership. One of the key topics in that module is “Emotional Intelligence”.  I’m sure some people are wondering “How do you develop and improve emotional intelligence?”  I’d like to summarize some of that here. What Is Emotional Intelligence and Why Is It Important? What Is Emotional

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Managing Team Conflict in Agile Teams – Is Conflict Normal?

Team Conflict

I recently saw a LinkedIn post from someone who was requesting advice on managing conflict in Agile teams. One response was to remove the people who are causing the conflict from the team. That may not be an appropriate solution – some level of conflict is necessary and healthy in a high performance team A

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Emotional Intelligence in Agile – Why Is Emotional Intelligence Important?

Who Gets Blamed When an Agile Project Fails?

The role of emotional intelligence in Agile is important to understand. It is a skill that is very difficult to master for many people. What is Emotional Intelligence? HelpGuide.org defines “emotional intelligence as follows: “Emotional intelligence (EQ) is the ability to identify, use, understand, and manage emotions in positive ways to relieve stress, communicate effectively,

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What Are Self-Organizing Teams?

What Are Self-organizing Teams?

Agile is very much built around the idea of self-organizing teams. But what are self-organizing teams? There is some confusion about that topic. Some teams have taken that to mean complete flexibility to do whatever they want without any management or leadership. That amounts to “anarchy” and there is a big difference between “anarchy” and

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Agile Cross-Functional Teams – Lessons Learned from Sports

Agile Team Performance

There are a lot of misconceptions about Agile cross-functional teams. Here are a few examples: Is Agile Really a Team of Peers? Is Specialization Inconsistent with Agile Teamwork? Is Individual Accountability Inconsistent with Agile? We can learn a lot from team sports that can be applied to Agile team performance to overcome these misconceptions. Misconceptions

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