Team self-selection

Background: When I started working with Serko, they were deploying code twice a day (which was fantastic) but there was frustration from the Product folk around why work was taking so long.

Approach: I created a portfolio kanban board to get visibility of who was doing what and we had twice-weekly standups with tech and product groups to check-in on the initiatives. While people were assigned to an initiative, they were moved around as one piece fell behind or another became more urgent. So I put everyone's names on strips of paper so we could see who was working on what, and how many things a single person was assigned to. I knew that things were heading in the wrong direction when the Marketing team were saying 'couldn't such and such work on x?' and the names kept moving around.

I know the power of a team and the change you see when a group of people have a clear direction and learn together about what it takes to get something done. So I suggested team self-selection and everyone from HR to the people who's day jobs would be affected, were keen to find out more.

We framed this up as a safe-to-fail experiment which helped to front-foot issues like, "it sounds like the cool kids picking sports teams at school", and "I hope it doesn't make things slower!"

We invited a couple of guys from Trade Me to tell us about their experiences and started to prep for the event. The lead-up involved a range of activities from defining the teams, their purpose, their backlog, the capability needs - to helping people in Technology get to know each other better so they could make more informed choices on the day.

Outcome: The event itself went well and people got into the spirit of the opportunity to choose for themselves. Once teams were underway, we ran a retrospective on the self-selection which elicited comments such as 'it feels like people genuinely want to be here', and we saw significant improvements in transparency and throughput of work. We ran self-selection again 6 months later (it's much easier for everyone the second time) and Serko continued this way of working even after I left.