I keep on hearing team mates say things like

“it’s not my job to test, I am a <insert_role>” or “It’s not my job to design the product, I am a <insert_role>”

and I am quite tired of the behaviours caused by the message when left unchecked.

A team is more than the sum of its parts, a team has the power of collaboration.

When I was young I used to play Rugby (union).

Rugby union is a highly specialised sport, in fact the 15 players on the pitch are divided in 2 main silos, “forwards” and “backs” and within the silos there are these following roles:

Forwards: 1. Loose-head prop, 2. Hooker, 3. Tight-head prop, 4 and 5. Lock, 6. Flanker, 7. Wing Forward, 8. Number eight, 9. Scrum half

Backs: 10. Fly half, 11 and 14. Wing, 12. First centre, 13. Second centre, 15. Fullback

WOW 13 different roles for 15 people in the same team, more than the usual PO/BA/DEV/TEST/UX etc. we find in modern agile teams. How come they are able to collaborate so effectively?

The difference is that nobody in a rugby team will ever use a sentence of this type:

“I am not doing X because my role is Y”

In fact the very best rugby players are not the super specialists but the ones that are good at every different skill and activity required to play rugby. (Research the case of Brian O’Driscoll to me the synthesis of excellence in collaboration skills)

When there is a ruck 2 meters from a goal line you will see the ten stone (63Kg) Scrum Half stick his head in and push the 15+ stone (95Kg+) players away from his goal line.

He won’t say, I’m a scrum half I don’t do rucks, I guarantee 100% he won’t, because if he does he will lose the respect of his teammates, his coach and his fans and never play the game again.

Why do rugby players collaborate so well even though they are such a specialistic group? Because they have one clear goal, the clear goal is to score more points than the opponents. They all get that and do their utmost to help their teammates achieve it.

Why are agile teams not collaborating like rugby players?

One of the reasons is that they don’t see a common goal in the customer value to be delivered but see the beauty of the “elegant code”, “smart test strategy”, “beautiful solution”, outstanding “user experience” and so on.

So if you want to get your team to collaborate better together you got to give them a common cause to fight for. And just to save you time, it is not lines of code, story points, tests passed, number of bugs or lack there of, it is something bigger and more important.

Discover what it is together with your team.