Team Building Workshop - Even more extreme!

A new product - A new team

It's been almost 7 years since I was entrusted with the task of selecting people from several existing Scrum teams and forming a new Scrum team for a completely new product at a previous employer of mine. An ex-colleague remembered this and asked me for the details, as he would now like to use it elsewhere.

Here are the boundary conditions that were specified:

• The existing teams were responsible for two products. A classic Scrum team for one of the two products and three other teams in the Large-Scale Scrum approach (LeSS for short) for the second product. These two existing teams should remain as cross-functional as possible and be able to continue working seamlessly.

• The Scrum Master and the Product Owner for the new product team had already been determined.

• If possible, the new team should also be cross-functional right from the start.

A Scrum Master colleague and I started by informing the four existing teams about the new product and the upcoming team formation and asking all team members to apply internally informally if they were interested. It was clear and out of the question for us that we would not pick out any people. If possible, the new team should be made up of volunteers on its own.

The tricky questions were: who should choose from the candidates, who would have the last word if the management did not agree with the team constellation, how would we make sure that everyone felt fairly taken into account and last but not least, how would we ensure that all five product teams were really functional afterwards and that all colleagues would agree with the decision as much as possible?

While the "applications" were slowly coming in, my Scrum Master colleague and I were still a bit at a loss as to how we could reach our goal. We knew team-building workshops from the introduction of Scrum in our company, but at that time completely different basic requirements and boundary conditions were given.

My colleague and I pondered and discussed it together during working hours and unfortunately each of us took home a lot of tension during this phase. One evening my daughter told me about an upcoming stay in a country home with her school class and she stated very clearly that the stupid thing about it was that you have to agree on who goes into a room with whom and that you don't want to offend anyone, but you also don't want to ruin your stay because of unpleasant roommates.

This statement echoed in my head all night and sleep was out of the question: actually, my daughter and her classmates had a similar problem as we had in the company. The realization matured that it had to be ensured that people could express themselves anonymously on the topic, because there would possibly be team constellations in which applicants would want to backtrack, because there could be people with whom you just don't want to be in a room or in a team.

That was the solution: We had to give all applicants the opportunity to set up team constellations and in turn give all applicants the opportunity to discard compositions that they did not like, and all this anonymously!

We then implemented this approach as follows:

All internal applicants were asked in one room. In addition to the already known people for Scrum Master and Product Owner, the new team should consist of three developers and a tester. Accordingly, the applicants were given the task of anonymously writing on a piece of paper the names of the four people for the new team whom they would personally consider to be a well-functioning team. Whether they called themselves or not was explicitly up to them. The resulting slips of paper with the proposed team constellations were collected and then the applicants left the room. An independent moderator reviewed all the slips of paper and sorted out invalid and duplicate ones. Then, alphabetically, each individual applicant was asked back into the room to the moderator and was presented with all the slips of paper on which his name was mentioned and only those! He was also invited in if there were no more slips of paper with his name on them. Now this candidate could calmly destroy all the shown pieces of paper he wanted to destroy, without any comment. As I said, this was done with each candidate individually until it was everyone's turn. The remaining constellations were sighted and only two remained, which differed only in a single position. The result was communicated to all candidates. All participants were happy about the implementation and the result, because it was above all very fair. It was easy to choose one of the two variants found that everyone, yes everyone, was happy with.

From my point of view, success factors were the anonymity of one's own "overall team proposal" and the anonymity when destroying variants in which one would be involved as a candidate. Whether, and if so, which slips of paper had already been eliminated by predecessors, the candidates did not find out in the individual interviews. They did not have to justify their decision. Unfortunately, some candidates were not presented with any slips of paper at all. On closer inspection, however, this was not completely tragic: all slips of paper with one's own name could have already been eliminated because of another name. It didn't have to be because of you. Everyone had the anonymous option to remove themselves completely from the equation. A very important anonymous "opt-out" factor!