What drives team performance?
The performance of a team depends on many factors. While we cannot fully understand how these factors interact, we can observe the actions teams take to improve how they work. We can also observe how those actions affect a team’s sense of its performance.
The agile framework called scrum provides an ideal environment for this kind of empiricism. Scrum asks teams to work in short, iterative time boxes called sprints. At the end of each sprint teams must ask themselves how to improve the way they work together. This is called a team retrospective, and yields data on the actions teams take on their path to self-improvement.
We are agile coaches with decades of experience. We have coached hundreds of teams. Using observations from retrospectives, we have identified five dimensions of team performance. We built our self-assessment tool from this analysis. Our goal is to collect data from thousands of teams, and use this data to refine our model.
The five dimensions of team performance.
Purpose.
Purpose describes the ability of a team to pursue a clear strategic direction, and measurable goals.
Relationships.
Relationships describes how well teams interact with their stakeholders to understand their priorities, and to set expectations.
Effectiveness.
Effectiveness describes the ability of a team to bring the right skills and methods to getting their work done.
Knowledge.
Knowledge describes how well teams continuously acquire, share and improve their collective knowledge.
Health.
Health describes the ability of a team to surface and resolve issues that prevent them from working better together, and with their stakeholders.
