team patterns and tools

Remote Agility Framework teams seek to respect circumstances and Tool the F Up! Patterns and tools help teams launch themselves and develop into high performing teams.

team launch

Clarify the team's purpose, explore its role in value creation and articulate how team members will collaborate.

Start with gaining a shared clarity of the system of work to understand where demand comes from, how it is prioritised and sequenced, how it moves through the system and how to measure performance.

Visualising the work: The process of understanding where demand comes from, its nature, the workflow to deliver value to customers and explicit policies.

The team designs their work system, clarifies their role, and provides transparency for the rest of the organisation.
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Constraints and Support: Capture any constraints that impact how the team prioritses, executes or releases value.

Clearly define the interactions with upstreams and downstream teams, including input and output quality expectations.

Represent the process for escalating risks and impediments.

Measuring Performance: Used to determine and facilitate the team’s continuous improvement. Where practical, metrics should be adopted from the Enterprise or Teams of Teams to ensure alignment across teams.

As a minimum all remote:af teams capture:
System Lead Time (Cycle Time)
Customer Lead Time
Failure vs Value Demand
Throughput
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The remote:af Team Alliance is designed to respect individual circumstances and the system of work. It enables the team to intentionally form the patterns for sustainable productivity.

Clarify purpose and team norms: Each team clarifies their purpose and integrates their visualisation in order to align on the value they provide to the organisation.

R:AF teams understand the value of synchronous and asynchronous communication. Effective remote teams work in the hours that they are most productive.

Teams are free to work at their own pace and should endeavour to build schedules that suit everyone whilst honouring team and organisational synchronisation points.
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Situational Empathy: All home environments are different and it is critical that remote teams build empathy for their fellow team members in a safe and respectful manner. In life we have many different roles.

The CEO in your office is more than a CEO in their home environment. Family and personal needs are influenced by culture and some team members will have additional responsibilities.

Not all home environments are designed to support the work we do. Situational empathy allows teams to explore the challenges that team members might experience whilst respecting their right to privacy.

Communication and policies: Remote Teams intentionally design the channels and cadence for communication within the team and with the broader organisation to respect individual circumstances.

Use information captured as part of the team alliance to craft explicit policies that reflect the unique needs of the team, whilst maintaining alignment to any existing Enterprise and Team of Teams policies.

Operational Cadence provides regular points for synchronisation through recurring timeboxed activities. At a minimum all remote:af teams will run remote:af Team Planning, remote:af Team Review and remote:af Team Retrospective.

Team Planning: Determine what to work on next by pulling the highest priority work into the team queue.

The remote:af Team Planning occurs at the start of each increment, monthly at a minimum.

Shorter planning cycles lead to faster feedback and the ability to adapt to changes in the environment rapidly.

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Team Review: Elicit feedback on what was delivered in comparison to the customer or stakeholder expectations.

The remote:af Team Review occurs at the end of each increment, monthly at a minimum. The shorter the feedback cycle, the increased ability to capture any divergence from customer expectations.
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Team Retrospective: Provide a platform for the team to reflect and engage in data-informed improvements.

The remote:af Team Retrospective review occurs at the end of each increment, monthly at a minimum. If you only run one event, run the team retrospective to focus on continuous improvement.

team health check

Embed regular checkpoints to identify team based satisfaction and identify areas to focus improvement.

The Value of a Team Health Check: Provide a consistent approach that enables the team to become more self-aware, spot systemic problems and decide where to focus improvement efforts.
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Collective and Individual Perspectives: The remote:af Team Health Check brings the team together to answer a series of questions designed to understand the health and wellbeing of the team.

Both individual and team perspectives are included to form a clear understanding of team health.

Team Context: The questions should focus on the team’s health (not personal health), whilst maintaining anonymity and individual situational empathy.

Audience: Each team member.

The remote:af Team Health Check can also be used as part of a wider transformation to see how teams are progressing

Questions: 10 areas of team health examined using targeted statements describing what optimum health may look like.
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Each question is read out by the facilitator and each member is asked to indicate how applicable they think the statement is to the team.

Rating and Discussion: Team member respond to questions on a Leichart scale anonymously.

The team discusses the aggregated data to celebrate the positives and understand pain points to identify what actions can be taken.
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Remember this is a individual perspective, there is no right answer and honesty is the best policy.

Actions: Use the team discussions to identify where the team feels the most improvement can be made. Actions are generated and agreed by the team to undertake.

Record the results: Keep a record of the aggregated results for each question so a baseline understanding of strengths and areas for improvement are captured for future use.
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Visualising the results over time: With radar charts, you can get a visual improvement over a set time period. This enables the team ratings of each question to be used as a comparison for a future health check to track improvement.

Over time, the answers give rise to trends on how the team is doing, how earlier actions are helping and what other improvements can be found.