Chapter 15
Create an Agile Work Group

You’re part of a work group. You might be part of a customer-support team, a program team that works across the organization, or even a management team such as the project portfolio team.

You work mostly independently of a team. Even in your team, you don’t tend to collaborate except during meetings. Can you still use an agile approach?

Of course. You rarely use iterations, although you might want a cadence for meetings and reporting. People and teams in your position often want to track cycle time and throughput. However, your meetings are likely different. Your metrics are different.

You can benefit from all the ideas in Chapter 3, ​Build Teamwork with Interpersonal Practices​, because you will need to collaborate. However, you are not a cross-functional team in the same way as a product-delivery team is.

Let’s see how an agile approach can work for you.

groupschoosing approach for work groupschoosing approach for There Is No One Right Agile Approach for a Work Group

Customer Support, Finance, Human Resources, and Sales can all benefit from using agile approaches. The difference is that you are part of a work group (where people work independently) rather than a team (where people are interdependent).

Suppose you work in Customer Support. You have a queue of work, which you might call “tickets.” When you are done with one ticket, you take the next ticket that’s at the top of the queue.

Every organization has a policy about what to do if you don’t have sufficient knowledge to complete that ticket. There’s no “agile” answer about what to do. However, I prefer to have people pair on work when at least one of them doesn’t know enough to work on that ticket alone.

It’s the same problem for other functional groups. Agile approaches—breaking work into small deliverables that have value, visualizing the work and the state of the work, and managing your work in progress—can benefit work groups. Consider what will work for your group.

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