Self Sufficient Team Before High Performing Team

Whenever we talk about agile teams or scrum teams we always talk about self-organizing and cross-functional teams. However, is that really enough? I think the underlying factor that we need to have for a successful team is self-sufficiency.

There is a major difference between self-organizing and self-sufficient. Self-organizing means that the team has the culture to take care of their own work without relying on others. Self-sufficient means that the team has enough on their toolbelt in order be self-organizing.

I think these are the major factor of self-sufficiency:

• Technical skills
  • Do the team members have the necessary technical skills to be independent? For example: if a team is expected to have  DevOps culture then we should ask the question whether any of the team members have the technical capabilities to enable that.
  • The next point is to see if as leaders we are doing whatever it takes to enable these individuals to attain those skills. This can be things like providing training, time to learn or even hiring a new team member with the skills so that he/she can help uplift the team’s capabilities.
• Technical resources
  • If we want a self-sufficient team then technical resources are important. Give an artist the paintbrush that he needs and he’ll create a masterpiece. This means if the team needs access to certain technical resources such as commercial libraries, tools, IDE, etc, if we can afford it, we should provide them.
• Access credentials and permissions
  • Quite simply it’s useless to have all the technology if it’s not available to the team. An example is if the company is using a cloud provider such as DigitalOcean or AWS, but the team doesn’t have any access to use it then it’s going to be difficult to achieve self-sufficiency. In a nutshell, provide access to the teams within security reasons.
• Autonomy for decision making
  • Can the team decide what they want to do at their level? If the higher level management keeps telling the team what to do and contradicting everything that they are trying to do then self-sufficiency won’t be achieved. In fact, the team will get used to it and there won’t be any will to be self-sufficient.
• Will
  • This one’s pretty important. I think will and skills must be balanced, in most cases I prefer slightly more will than skills. What I mean is that the team members must have the will to become self-sufficient and self-organizing. If the will does not exist then whatever we talk about in the points above are negated.
  • If the will does not exist or low, then it’s a leader’s job to motivate the team and provide them with the energy.

I think before we can achieve self-organizing high performing agile team, we must achieve team self-sufficiency first. As always, good luck with your journey to agility.