Stable Team

Why?

Roman Pichler, 敏捷影响力前20，Mike Cohn签名系列《Agile Product Development with Scrum》作者，Scrum联盟CSPO课程负责人：

STABLE SCRUM TEAMS

Data

Agile Solution公司Rally的调查，里边有一些数据：

STABLE TEAMS REALLY DO MATTER

How?

Scrum之父Jeff Sutherland维护的Scrum Patterns:

Stable Teams

Ben Linders 在InfoQ的文章：

Developing Stable Teams, and Dealing with Dysfunctions

Ben Linders 的另一篇文章：

Establishing and maintaining stable teams

Keep teams stable, manage work packages

I remember one organization where I worked with that, due to frequent changes in the team composition, had difficulty implementing effective teamwork. They decided to focused on keeping stable teams. This turned out to be quite difficult initially. First, there was a shortage of people, so whenever a new project was started there was always pressure on the running projects to release people. Next, there often were priority changes in the projects, which made it difficult for lower-priority projects to keep people. Also, occasionally teams had a lack of specific knowledge and skills, so then the team itself requested to add somebody. The organization tried to manage team changes as much as possible, but even when it did it in a controlled way, it always had an impact on the team’s productivity, since a team had to stabilize after every personnel change, which resulted in temporary performance dips.

The organization came up with a solution—it defined fixed teams based upon product lines, and focused upon managing work packages for the teams instead of managing team composition, i.e. fitting the work to the team i.s.o. changing teams to get the work done. The result was that teams became more coherent and better at managing and improving themselves. Team members got more chances to work together and build relationships. One drawback was that occasionally team members did not work together on tasks, since tasks that were not related were combined into a work package for a team increment in order to use the available capacity. But even in those situations, team members supported each other, and the team as a whole performed better. The organization learned that, though it is not easy to keep teams stable, it is possible and it can really give a performance boost to the teams.