Development team to be effective

Looking for traits for development to be effective

Step1: Learn through empiricism --> Self-Organize --> Become cross-functional / build new skills and capabilities --> Goto Step1

IMO, it's a two step approach.

Only assumption is most of the team members are motivated & they have an environment to succeed.

First, the harder one, build the vulnerability based trust among team members. That will allow them to have mutual respect, constructive disagreement, unfiltered passionate discussions, space for creativity and demand to hold each other accountable.

Second, the easier part, give them the vision. That will give them the answers like, why they are there, what problem they are solving, why it's important, how their knowledge makes a difference to the real world problem, etc.

There will be ups and downs. There you will need someone who will guide/coach/mentor/teach them to align them to their goal.

Development Team members should have more than one skill. They should also be pleasant to work, and easy to get along, with.

How about a few traits that are needed but from outside of the development team?

• Management empowers the team to make their own decisions instead of trying to constantly tell them what to do
• Management trusts that the team will make the right decisions based upon the information that they have
• Management trusts that the Product Owner will make the right decisions for the Product direction and will help to ensure that the Development Team is working on the right thing
• Scrum Master does not try to manage the team
• Management does not ask for graphs, charts, metrics to show how the team is improving and instead looks at the value that is being delivered by the team to the stakeholder
• Customers are happy about the value that is being delivered and they are using the product consistently
• Costumer Support is fielding fewer calls about defects

A large part of the Development Team's success is dependent on the rest of the organization changing to support the Scrum framework and adopting agile ways of thinking.