Team design for continuous delivery

About this Tutorial

This session aims to help you improve team performance by introducing the foundations of high performing teams. We do this through the lens of teams which are expected to create, or contribute to, an organisation's continuous delivery (CD) capability. It is intended to provide inspiration, principles and practical advice for a range of roles, including team member, coach, manager, leader. Often talks focus on changing other people - here, we encourage you to look inward, reflect and consider your own behaviours. The session includes simple initiatives that can be tried almost straight away.

There are 3 main topic areas, each receiving equal attention:

1. Are continuous delivery teams different to other teams? We look at what it takes to be a successful CD team, suggesting that often it's the team's ability to work across the organisation to understand multiple perspectives and stimulate improvement. To support this, members need to handle a high degree of interaction, which is challenging for individuals and systems of work. Having explored the specialisms, we move onto factors thought to be the foundation of high performance teams.
2. We introduce employee engagement, and how it means much more than keeping people happy. We look at ways to measure engagement, and how to improve it.
3. Studies have shown one of the greatest contributors to employee engagement (and hence performance) is psychological safety. This section explains what it is, why it is important and how to further it in teams and interactions.

The session is lively and interactive - topics are introduced from first principles, and no previous agile knowledge is required.

About the Speaker

John Clapham is an independent coach, trainer and consultant. He specialises in DevOps and agile, helping teams to build great products, and organisations to become more effective, productive and enjoyable to work in. His broad experience in software development ranges from start-up to enterprise scale, formed in the publishing, telecommunications, commerce, defense and public sector arenas.

 johnC_Bristol