Team Practices Group/Our skills

The Team Practices Group (TPG) was dissolved in 2017.

Members of TPG may be available to offer mentoring, training, or consultation in the following areas, with the intention of building capacity throughout the organization.

Agile Coaching

• Implementing agile practices with teams
  • Scrum facilitation and coaching related to:
    • Processes
    • Roles:
      • Product Owner
      • ScrumMaster
      • Team Member
  • Other
    • Kanban
    • XP (Extreme Programming)
    • Organic practices in accordance with the agile manifesto and agile principles

• Removing impediments to software development and value delivery

• Agile roadmap development

• Backlog design

• User story creation and refinement
• Backlog and Velocity Estimation

Supporting the delivery of high quality software

• Estimation and Forecasting
• Software development process planning

• Software Launch/Release Management
• Iteration management
• Risk mitigation
• Work tracking and planning
• Coordinating w/ and coaching management
• Coaching on requirements gathering

Process design

• Consulting and support for context-appropriate workflows
• Phabricator
  • Designing workboards and workflows
  • Tricks and tips for using it more effectively
• Goals development, tracking, and planning
  • Quarterly planning support

• Cross-team communication and collaboration
• Strategy development

• Processes for thinking through strategy or elements of strategy

Facilitation

• Facilitation of various types of Agile ceremonies:
  • Planning (e.g. sprint planning and backlog grooming)
  • Retrospectives
  • Standups
  • Estimation
  • Iteration review
• Showcases

• Offsites/team development workshops
  • Offsite/workshop design and facilitation
• General Group facilitation

• Helping groups leverage their skills
• The use of participation formats and tools for strong decisions
• Chartwriting
• Collaborative decision making

Team and Organizational Dynamics

• Assessing and supporting improvement of team dynamics
• Practices for working on/with distributed teams
• Tools, practices, and techniques to increase engagement and participation
  • Eg Effective listening (modeling and teaching)

• Working simultaneously with multiple teams or groups to assess and support resolution of challenges/issues affecting team health and value delivery beyond the scope of any single team/group
• Team health checks

Other

• Teach/train interested individuals about project management

• Using Wikis effectively for team documentation
  • Developing from rough drafts through finished documents
  • Balancing transparency and privacy
  • Recording meeting minutes and decisions

• Coaching on how to set up an Unconference
• Coaching on software engineering practices

• Coaching on code review
• Coaching on pair programming
• Coaching on refactoring
• Coaching on automated testing and Test-driven development