Facilitation Principles for Agile Teams

Participatory – Agile teams are self managing, cross functional and made of of team members with a mix of capabilities that all contribute to shared goals to deliver increments of customer value each and every sprint. They have a shared responsibility. This requires all the people in the team to be involved and have a say. If ideas and processes are forced upon people, they are less likely to want to participate.  Agile emphasises the value of collaboration as an effective way to build workable solutions to complex problems. Participation means bringing people together to discuss ideas, explore and learn with each other in order to achieve goals better and quicker. This participation also provides team members with meaningful involvement in influencing decision making and action.  This principle involves:

• Intellectual, emotional and energetic engagement
• Full participation
• Share responsibility

Healthy  – Facilitation should create a safe space for people to be heard and have robust discussion, even if sometimes there will inevitably be conflicting perspectives. People should feel safe to raise conflicting perspectives and opinions. A facilitator should create a safe place for healthy discussion and build trust. For this reason, facilitators are expected to remain neutral in the conversation. They are there to guide and ensure that conversations remain respectful and a place where people can empathise and learn from each other, even if they don’t agree. Allowing teams the opportunity to discuss and learn together creates trust, respect and growth. Organisations committed to learning can growing significantly by using the time together to learn about working together more effectively. In our digital world, fast learning is critical so this facilitation principle helps keep conversations relevant and healthy. Creating a healthy and safe environment helps people explore different perspectives and come to a shared understanding. Healthy facilitation promotes:

• Human respect
• Deep learning
• Energetic culture

Transparency – The emergent process and work must be visible to people performing the work and  stakeholders who receive the work. This is because important decisions are based on the perceived state of outcome of a sprint’s increment as well as other artefacts such as the product backlog and sprint backlog. If these artefacts have low transparency, this can lead to decisions that diminish value and increase risk. The key pillars of empiricism are transparency, inspection and adaptation. Sometimes transparency gets confused with visibility. Visibility helps create transparency, but ultimately transparency only exists when there is shared understanding through conversation and discussion to understand the perspectives, analysis and process that contributed to the outcome. . Transparency enables inspection. Inspection without transparency is misleading and wasteful. once we have inspected the true nature of the increment, can we then make decision on the next steps.  Transparency therefore creates:

• Aligned energy
• Collective wisdom
• Clear action and learning

Process – Facilitation helps participants to be guided towards a desired objective for the interaction during the agile events. Facilitation isn’t about just doing fun ice breakers. The techniques chosen should clearly link to the objectives for the event to be effective. To enact this process, facilitators will need to have a “toolkit” of approaches and techniques that encourage participation, promote inclusion as well as finding ways to navigate and leverage diversity within teams. There are many ways groups can agree, decide, create or plan together. It is important for facilitators to prepare and develop a process that will work best for the size and nature of the agile team that also fits within the event timebox. Facilitators need to plan a facilitation sequence that will prompt engaging discussion and activities that will help ensure the objective of the event is achieved.  A clear process helps keep the team focused. The process facilitation principle is aimed to:

• Achieve objectives
• Maximise energy and participation
• Harness diversity and inclusion

Purposeful – To be effective, agile events should keep the purpose and the objective in mind. Each sprint event has a clear purpose that helps team to iteratively show progress towards agreed the sprint goal and ultimately having an increment of product at the end of each sprint to obtain feedback to help guide decisions for the next increment. The sprint goal helps move the scrum team towards the product goal which is the longer term objective and is clearly linked to wider organisation goals to deliver value outcomes to customers. Lots of  people only focus on the format in which we can facilitate Scrum Events. However, it  is the relationships and interactions that occur that make great facilitation a powerful ‘tool’ to help teams move to their shared objectives.  Facilitators need to prepare for the event to ensure the intent of each agile event purpose is met.  Clear event objectives will help facilitate the process by which the team members will interact and ensures the interaction moves towards an outcome. Purposefulness provides:

• Focus 
• Clear objectives

As a facilitator it is important to have a good understanding of the agile events and have a range of facilitation techniques and approaches, however it is facilitating the dynamics and interactions within these events that are essential for reaching the group’s objective.  All five principles work hand in hand to ensure that agile events will be more focused, productive and effective. This requires a facilitator to plan for the facilitation to get the most out of the interaction of each event. Facilitation is a key skill to help your scrum teams become awesome and high performing.agile