We introduce useful and proven practices that increase the sticking power of new agile teams, allowing them to stay agile long into the future. To create sustainable change, agile teams have to overcome organizational gravity that pulls them back into the old, comfortable ways of working. New agile teams are especially at risk of falling back after the coaches leave or the agile transition is declared 'over'. By helping the team set expectations early, the +15 practices provide support just when the team is most vulnerable, and increases the chance of creating lasting change. We introduce two concepts, the +15 Team and the +15 Flightplan, that support teams not just at the beginning of a transformation, when management attention and resources are focused on the effort, but much later on as the teams begin unlocking some of the more challenging engineering practices, such as continuous integration or continual refactoring which take time and repeated practice to achieve. You will learn how to work with a new team to apply these concepts, and how the team can use these to guide growth over time. Successful Agile transformations are built on successful Agile teams; achieving *sustainable* success depends on helping those teams grow and evolve over time. But in order to be self-organized and self-directed, newly formed agile teams need an example to follow; they need to have a glimpse of where a team can get to after 3, 6 or 12 months of continual retrospection, learning and improvement. Unfortunately, in many cases, there are few examples of such success around them. In a large organization, the inertia of existing cultural norms is likely to weigh down on any visions of excellent execution, diluting the vision and ultimately limiting the success of the teams and the transition. The +15 Team is a simple exercise to focus the team on developing good agile behaviors that provide the roots from which a team can grow. The +15 Flightplan is a workshop or game that delivers a long-term plan for agile maturity created by the team that allows the team to soar over time. Participants will be introduced to this technique as a way to better guide the team’s development over time as well as learn how and when to respond. Spending just minutes at every retrospective using these artifacts can make the difference between a team returning to old habits and performance levels or striding forward to become self-directed, high-performing agile teams.
http://submit2012.agilealliance.org/files/session_pdfs/Giving Teams the Roots to Grow and Wings to Fly.pdf
