Whether you are forming a new agile team or mixing people in an already existing team you start somewhat afresh. In an existing team the balance and group dynamics changes, in a new team people are experiencing each other for the first time and checking what the boundaries are. I don’t want to get into details of what can possibly happen — it’s best if you dig into works of Bruce Tuckman and his four-stage model or Gustave Le Bon’s “The Crowd”. The former indicated that the team goes through the stages of Forming - Storming - Norming - Performing. I would like to concentrate on the very initial stage of “Forming” the team in the first weeks of it’s existence.

This is a story about a Team working in Scrum that wanted to turn to Kanban and ended up, deliberately, working in something resembling Scrum-ban. Scrum-ban basics can be found in Wikipedia. We did not follow all of them.

We, Scrum Masters at Allegro, undertake actions that facilitate the work of our Developers, Product Owners and the Organization itself. We are working with individuals and teams in a variety of ways to remove impediments, increase their agility, etc. We do not limit ourselves to only following the Scrum Guide as this 16-pager is only a framework — the possibilities of acting as a change agent, facilitator and servant leader seem to be endless.