Understanding Your Team's Foundation: A Practical Guide to the Three Pillars of Practice Evolution

In our previous post, we explored how static processes can quietly burden software teams, from decreased engagement to missed innovation opportunities. Today, we're moving from reflection to action with a practical guide to understanding your team's foundation through the three pillars of practice evolution: Team, Performance, and Environmental Stability.

Before you can evolve your practices effectively, you need to understand where you're starting from. Think of it like planning a journey - you need to know your current location before you can chart the best path forward.

Quick Exercise: Your Current State

Before we dive into the detailed assessment, take two minutes to write down your gut feeling about your team's stability. Take a quick temperature check. For each question below, write down both your immediate response and what makes you feel that way:

• How well does your team work together?
  What specific interactions or situations shape this feeling?
• How consistently does your team deliver?
  Which recent outcomes or patterns come to mind?
• How much control do you have over your working environment?
  What gives you that sense of control or lack thereof?
  
  

Keep these initial impressions and your reasoning handy - they'll provide valuable context as we move through the structured assessment. Often, our gut feelings point to important patterns we haven't fully articulated yet.

Next Steps

Webs, why are you giving me next steps when I haven't even read the blog post?

I'm giving you the next steps not because I want you to become a superhero and tackle everything at once, but because I want to save you from the chaos of trying to do it all right now. Think of this as a sneak peek into your action-packed week ahead. So, take a deep breath, read on, and plan your week like a pro!

Over the next week:

1. Complete the quick assessments for each pillar
2. Share your findings with your team
3. Note any surprises or patterns you discover
4. Start thinking about which areas might benefit from evolution

The Three Pillars: A Practical Introduction

Team Stability Assessment

Team stability isn't about having the same people forever - it's about how well your team functions as a unit. Let's gather some initial data.

Quick Assessment Exercise

Track these five indicators over the next week:

1. Questions asked in team meetings (count them)
2. Suggestions for improvements made by team members
3. Times someone admits to not knowing something
4. Instances of spontaneous help offered
5. Discussions that challenge current practices

Tip: Create a simple tally in your notes or team chat. The actual numbers matter less than the patterns they reveal.

Performance Stability Assessment

Performance stability means having a clear picture of how well your current practices work. Here's how to start measuring it.

Quick Assessment Exercise: Performance Patterns

Look at your team's delivery patterns over the last month (or 2-3 work increments if you use Sprints). Focus on these five areas:

1. Work Flow
   • How predictably does work move from start to finish?
   • What's your completion rate for planned work?
   • Where does work tend to get stuck?
2. Quality Indicators
   • How often do issues get caught before release?
   • At what stages are issues usually found?
   • How much rework happens after development?
3. Collaboration Efficiency
   • How smoothly does work move between team members?
   • What's your typical wait time for handoffs?
   • Where do you see frequent blockers?
4. Delivery Reliability
   • How consistently can you deploy changes?
   • How often do deployments need rollback?
   • How quickly can you resolve production issues?
5. Value Delivery
   • How quickly does feedback reach the team?
   • How often do deliveries meet user needs?
   • What's your ratio of feature work to fixing issues?

Tip: Use whatever metrics your current process already tracks. The goal is understanding patterns, not creating new measurement systems.

*Framework Note: Whether you use Scrum's Velocity, Kanban's Lead Time, or SAFe's Program Increment metrics, look for trends rather than absolute numbers. Every framework has ways to track these patterns - use what you already have.

Environmental Stability Assessment

Your environment includes everything from your tools to your organizational context. This exercise works best as a team activity that reveals different perspectives.

Quick Assessment Exercise: Individual Influence Maps

• Draw themselves and the team in the center of a blank page
• Add circles for every external factor they interact with (other teams, tools, processes, etc.)
• Draw arrows showing dependencies and interactions
• Mark each arrow as "stable" or "variable"
• Note which factors they feel they can influence

Tip: This can also be done using a digital tool like Miro or LucidChart

• • Have each person briefly share their diagram
  • Notice what's different in each person's view:
    • What factors appear in some maps but not others?
    • Which relationships do people see differently?
    • What do people consider stable or variable?
    • Where do people disagree about what they can influence?

Tip: The differences between diagrams are often more revealing than any single diagram. Pay special attention to factors that surprise others on the team - these often highlight important perspectives or dependencies that aren't visible to everyone.

*Facilitation Notes:

• If team members seem hesitant to share differences, start by asking "What surprised you most when looking at others' diagrams?" This can make it easier to discuss different viewpoints.
• This is also a great time to use some of the strategies from my post on How to Adapt Engagement Strategies to Build Trust and Safety.

Putting It All Together

Now that you've gathered initial data about each pillar, look for patterns:

• Where do you see the most variability?
• Which areas feel most stable?
• Where do you have the most control?
• Where do you see opportunities for improvement?

These insights will be crucial as we explore why traditional maturity models often fail to address teams' real needs - the topic of our next post.

Next Steps (Again)

1. Complete the quick assessments for each pillar
2. Share your findings with your team
3. Note any surprises or patterns you discover
4. Start thinking about which areas might benefit from evolution
   
   

Share Your Experience

How do you track these patterns in your team? Whether you're using Scrum, Kanban, SAFe, or another approach, we'd love to hear:

• Which metrics have proven most valuable for your team?
• What unexpected patterns have you discovered?
• How do you gather this data in a way that doesn't create overhead?

Share your experiences in the comments below. Your insights could help other teams find better ways to understand their performance patterns.

Want to learn more about evolving your team's practices? Check out our previous post about the hidden costs of static processes, and stay tuned for our next post exploring why traditional maturity models often fall short.