Key Principle: Build Cross-Functional Teams

THIS CHAPTER AND THE NEXT CHAPTER   The fundamental unit of productivity in Agile development is the team—not high-performing individuals, but high-performing teams. This is a key concept, and we have seen many organizations sabotage their Agile adoptions from the outset by not understanding what is needed for Agile teams to succeed and not supporting them in the ways they need to be supported.

The lessons in this chapter discuss structural issues related to Agile teams, and the next chapter describes Agile team culture.

The 2018 Accelerate: State of DevOps report found that, “High performing teams are twice as likely to be developing and delivering software in a single, cross-functional team … we found that low performers were twice as likely to be developing and delivering software in separate, silo’d teams than elite performers” [emphasis added] (DORA, 2018).

An effective Agile team includes the functions or disciplines needed for the team to work independently (that is, be largely self-managed). For work in Cynefin’s Complex domain, much of the team’s work will consist of $probe - sense - respond$ ...