Building A Team: Understanding Agile History

When a team is introduced to Agile, they must approach it like any new tool mechanism. The first step is to learn the equipment, learn how to use it, learn how to implement with it, finally understanding as a team how to use it together. What makes Agile quite different is that it assumes each team member knows how to use the system beforehand. Trying to tackle agile like any other tool can lead to little or no positive productivity. One of the main ideas central to Agile is being able to adapt as a team, changing how they work together to better suit the needs of the project. By doing so, the team can become a cohesive unit that is able to take greater responsibility for any work within the project.

Agile should help the team change their preconceived notions of running a project, and each member should be able to look at their project and the work they accomplish in a much different way. This change in strategy for the team gives the possibility of greater efficiency in terms of productivity. For Agile, this step is increasingly important to understand from the earliest point in the project because implementing it later can cause the team to rely on past strategies to get things done. Having the team on board from the earliest stage can determine if the project or team is able to succeed with Agile.

Agile causes a team to think not only about the team member roles and responsibilities, but also the mindset and strategy for each of those roles. Agile consists of many well known lightweight frameworks that have similar clearly defined roles, but can have different names within the context of each framework, and Agile is quite lax when it comes to these team practices -just not the roles. As a new Agile team, it is heavily suggested to follow the defined roles and the few rules this methodology has. Understand that each of these roles plays a bigger part in the organization, with the purpose to encourage the team to accept increased self-organization and empowerment.

In the end, to fully embrace the Agile methodology, the team needs to embrace their roles and understand they play integral parts of the project. Leaving out some parts of changing things can easily create more problems down the line within the Agile  system.

Works Cited

"Agile at Work: Building Your Agile Team." Lynda.com - from LinkedIn, www.lynda.com/		Business-Skills-tutorials/Welcome/175073/379413-4.html. Accessed 1 Nov. 2017.