Four years of self-selection reteaming at Redgate - Øredev 2022
Traditional wisdom teaches us that long-lived, stable teams perform best, and that changing team membership is to be avoided as much as possible. At Redgate Software we’ve challenged this advice, believing it was better for our engineers and the overall organisation to deliberately change-up our teams every year. Our approach has been to give people a strong influence over which team they will join, encouraging them to move towards the work they find most engaging. Perhaps surprisingly, this has been hugely successful and has helped us create a development culture of engagement, resilience and opportunity. In this deck, Chris shares how Redgate came to try self-selection team reorganisation in the first place, and how & why this has become an established annual event. Key takeaways - Why you should consider deliberately changing your teams - Why and how Redgate ran their self-selection process - What happened as a result of deliberate reteaming at Redgate
Four years of self-selection reteaming at Redgate - Øredev 2022
- 1. Chris Smith, Head of Product Delivery Øredev, 8th November 2022
- 3. • When team composition changes • Teams will always change: • People leave and join teams • People leave and join organizations • Organizations create new teams, split teams, disband teams • We can also choose to change
- 6. • “Teams with stable membership perform better” • “Keep your teams the same for predictability” • “We don’t want to repeat the ‘forming, storming, norming & performing’ pattern for each project”
- 9. • Collective blindness • Experts stuck in teams • Lack of opportunity to learn • Siloed teams • Lack of alignment and connectedness
- 15. Team members have full freedom to move, form or disband teams when they choose Someone “at the top” has full control on team membership and lifecycle
- 17. Team members have full freedom to move, form or disband teams when they choose Someone “at the top” has full control on team membership and lifecycle
- 23. New Picture?
- 24. Explore Exploit Sustain Retire Increase Serviceable Addressable Market Maximise Return on Investment Maximise Profit Find Product Market fit
- 25. • To change how we invest our teams each year • To align with our principles • To break down silos and encourage wider connectedness • To spread knowledge, best practice and innovation throughout the organisation • To enable personal growth and development
- 27. time
- 28. 1. Communicate early and openly 2. Encourage people to explore 3. Coach everyone through the process 4. Collaboratively create the new team structure 5. Support new & changing teams
- 31. Who joined new teams and how much influence did they really have?
- 32. Who joined new teams and how much influence did they really have?
- 33. Who joined new teams and how much influence did they really have?
- 34. Who joined new teams and how much influence did they really have?
- 37. We track the four key metrics from Accelerate and the State of DevOps report: • Delivery lead time • Deployment frequency • Change fail percentage • Mean time to restore (MTTR)
- 43. • Reteaming is an established, annual event • We’ve proven that we can respond to the needs of the company • People do want to move teams for personal growth • We’re better at forming teams and onboarding new joiners • Good practices and behaviours spread naturally between teams • Our people support the process • Positive for employer brand and hiring
- 45. References
- 46. @cj_smithy linkedin.com/in/chrissmithagile chris.smith@red-gate.com Chris Smith Head of Product Delivery, Redgate Software leadingagileteams.com