Organizational leaders need to help teams to adapt to a new agile way of working because they are the core unit of the company.

Tannenbaum and Salas (2020) in their book Teams That Work: The Seven Drivers of Team Effectiveness define teams as a group that has the following characteristics:
● Are viewed by others as a unit.
● Consist of two or more people.
● Each team focuses on clearly defined internal or external customers, with a mission to fully understand and meet their needs.
● Have the requisite skills to deliver their objectives.
● Interact with and rely on one one another and have a shared sense of common purpose or goal.
● Plan to deliver their goal in a collaborative way and review their work and process process in a similar manner.

In agile organizations, software development teams had formal roles such as developers, testers and project managers. With the onset of agile methods, these roles were replaced with the scrum master and product owner that represent a cross-functional team that comprised of teams such as
developers, testers, business analysts, user interface designers, artificial intelligence and machine learning experts (Hoda, 2019).

According to McKinsey (2018), there are three essential leadership requirements that follow from all agile ways of working in a team:

● First, the teams should be connected, diverse and empowered. Small, dynamic, and high-performing teams are the main organizing unit of agile organisations.

● Second, leaders must allow and encourage agile teams to work in rapid cycles to enable them to deliver greater value, more efficiently and more quickly. quickly. Leaders must help teams focus on important and urgent tasks through rigorous prioritization (which in turn create a backlog). This cuts the friction inherent in multi-tasking.

● Third, all leaders must keep agile teams focused on the customer and on creating value for customers. This includes both external customers and internal customers for whatever product or service the team is providing.

A case study of an agile team in a software organisation is at the Finnish-based multinational telecommunications company, Nokia. According to Hakkarainen (2010 ) Nokia’s success can be attributed to four things: excellent timing, a sharp focus on core business, relentless cost control
and consistent brand-building. One of its division, Nokia Siemens Networks has used agile software development practices (Cooke. 2014) to create over 40 products under the leadership of Petri Haapio, such as the 4GE LTE mobile portable router.

Nokia Siemens Networks is a 2006 joint venture between Nokia and German manufacturer, Siemens, whose role was to create wired and wireless infrastructure.

The Nokia Siemens Networks comprise of self-organising teams having either 10 people working in a single location, to teams of 500 people working at various sites. The ability of the Nokia Siemens Networks division to apply agile methodologies to a large software development company has made the company to be considered as an example in the industry with a yardstick
known as the “Nokia Test” that is used to test how large software development companies can use the telecommunication’s company Scrum methodologies to determine how agile they are.

Haapio’s advise for Nokia Siemens Networks to become an agile team was to revolutionize it to a culture that could make products that were contemporary and:

● Increase customer satisfaction by focusing on the most value added features fast.
● Increase productivity and quality.
● Responsive to changes in the business environment.

In 2013, Nokia bought out the shares of Siemens and renamed the Nokia Siemens Networks division to Nokia Solutions and Networks after being edged by competitors such as Ericsson.

According to McKinsey (2008), the call to action (CTA) for organisations to transform their own agile teams. include:

● Building open, diverse, and empowered teams that encourage plural views
and dissent.
● Encourage software development teams to focus on customers, understand
their needs deeply, and cocreator win–win solutions with them.
● Exploring opportunities to deploy design thinking and business-model
innovation.
● Support working in rapid cycles, with rigorous task prioritization; focused,
short bursts of work; and frequent reflection to measure and learn. (663
words).

Written by Caroline Theuri