apm 5 2

As an agile project manager, you'll likely be involved in the forming of agile teams. I know we talked about this before, but there's really two flavors of agile teams that you're going to come across as a project manager. The first one is a cross functional feature team. On that team we have all the skills needed to deliver a thing of value to the customer. The other type of agile team you might come across is a component team. Maybe we have a dedicated testing team. I see this one often. They're not really cross functional. They don't have all the skills that are needed to deliver value end to end, but they're really good at testing. Let's take a quick look at the pros and cons of each. In thinking about cross functional feature teams, some of the benefits include reduced dependencies. These teams minimize the need for handoffs between different groups and that enables faster and more efficient delivery of value to our customers. Customer Alignment by being closely aligned with customer needs and business objectives, cross functional teams ensure that their work is focused on delivering real value and enhanced collaboration. These diverse skill sets within the team they foster better collaboration and innovation and that often leads to more creative solutions and effective problem solving. But it isn't all new sneakers and bubblegum. There's some drawbacks as well. Skill challenges it can be difficult to bring all the necessary skills into one team and keep them stable, especially in technical environments. Complex Coordination Managing diverse expertise can lead to coordination challenges and potential role confusion if responsibilities aren't clearly defined. Potential for conflict these diverse perspectives sometimes result in conflicts across the team and so it takes some strong conflict resolution skills to create a positive working environment. Alright, let's look at the component team. Some of the benefits of a component team might include things like specialized expertise. Component teams are ideal when dealing with niche technologies or expensive skill sets that are hard to find. Efficiency in specific functions these teams can achieve high efficiency and quality in their specific function such as testing or database management. Cost effective resource utilization by centralizing these skills on a single team, organizations can optimize the resource without necessarily embedding all the skills across all the teams. And of course, there's some drawbacks to component teams. Increased handoffs Component teams tend to have a number of handoffs between different teams. As work is transferred between different groups and that can slow down delivery, it can create bottlenecks. Coordination challenges these teams require additional coordination and dependency management that increases the complexity of project management and potentially leads to delays. Customer detachment Component teams. Well, they can become disconnected from the end customer. Focusing more on their specialized function rather than the overall customer value, and that may impact our alignment with business goals. Okay, so if you have to choose between either of these two for your entire project team, which one do you think would be the best one? Cross functional feature teams. That's right. The answer is cross functional feature teams. The going to be able to deliver end to end value the quickest. But here's my sort of observation from the field. You're probably not going to have all cross functional teams. You must be joking. In fact, it's pretty rare. In my experience, there is almost always a need for a component team, but if you're trying to optimize for one, you should have far more feature teams than you do component teams. Just understand that there's trade offs.