Enable in-team and cross-team collaboration
Effective collaboration is critical for well-functioning Agile teams. Enabling it requires cultural changes, cross-functional team collaboration, and tooling.
Cultural changes
Over recent decades, offices have often become open spaces with few walls. At the time of writing, a significant shift to working from home started as a response to the pandemic. Both situations can limit collaboration, and ambient noise and distractions often reduce productivity. Staff tends to work better when they have comfortable working environments. Defined meeting times and locations let teams choose when they want to interact with others.
Asynchronous communication should be encouraged, but there should not be an expectation that all communications will be responded to urgently. Staff should focus on their primary tasks without feeling like they are being left out of important decisions.
All meetings should have strict timeframes and, more importantly, have a plan. If there is no plan, there should be no meeting.
As it is becoming harder to find the required staff, great teams will be as comfortable with remote or work-from-home as with workers in the office.
To be successful, though, collaboration via communication should become part of the organization's DNA.
Staff should be encouraged to communicate openly and frankly. Learning to deal with conflict is essential for any team, as there will be disagreements at some point. Mediation skills training would be helpful.
Cross-functional teams
Team members need good collaboration. It is also essential to have a great partnership with wider teams to bring people with different functional expertise together to work toward a common goal.
Often, there will be people from other departments within an organization.
Faster and better innovation can occur in these cross-functional teams.
People from different areas of the organization will have different views of the same problem and are more likely to come up with alternate solutions to problems or challenges. Existing entrenched ideas are more likely to be challenged.
Cross-functional teams can also minimize turf wars within organizations. The more widely a project appears to have ownership, the easier it will be to be widely accepted. Bringing cross-functional teams together also helps to spread knowledge across an organization.
Recognizing and rewarding collective behavior across cross-functional teams can also help to increase team cohesion.
Collaboration tooling
Agile teams commonly use the following collaboration tools:
Teams (Microsoft): A group chat application from Microsoft. It provides a combined location with workplace chat, meetings, notes, and storage of file attachments. A user can be a member of many teams.
Slack: A commonly used tool for collaboration in Agile and DevOps teams. From a single interface, it provides a series of separate communication channels that can be organized by project, team, or topic. Conversations are kept and are searchable. It is straightforward to add both internal and external team members. Slack integrates with many third-party tools like GitHub for source code and DropBox for document and file storage.
Jira: A commonly used tool for planning, tracking, releasing, and reporting.
Asana: A standard tool designed to keep team plans, progress, and discussions in a single place. It has strong capabilities around timelines and boards.
Glip: An offering from Ring Central that provides chat, video, and task management.
Other standard tools with collaboration offerings include ProofHub, RedBooth, Trello, DaPulse, and many others.