At Agile Partner, our team of agile coaches has been formalizing an approach to bootstrap a delivery team. In this talk, we want to share this approach with the audience.

For years now, we have been working with many different teams, with customers of all sizes and all types of businesses, from large financial organization or industries, through SMEs and public-sector institutions, to small startups. Accompanying all these team, bootstrapping new projects or helping existing teams to embrace agility, we started formalizing an approach, to capitalize on what we had learned, and start reusing workshops and tools in a consistent way.

We call this approach Delivery Team Bootstrap.

It is part of a larger scale approach to bootstraping different kind of teams

• Delivery Team Bootstrap : Those who deliver software
• Discovery Team Bootstrap : Those who envision what should be done
• Transformation Team Bootstrap : Those who transform an organization in an agile manner
• Portfolio Team Bootstrap : Those who prioritize initiative at the strategic level

With an analogy to a Sprint 0, the Delivery Team Bootstrap allows a group of 2 or 3 coaches to help launching a new team initiative in an agile manner in 5 to 10 days, depending on the context. The bootstrap itself addresses several themes that can be talked in 1 day. For each theme a series of workshops and facilitation tools can be used to move towards the expected outcome.

The different themes that we address are the following

• Understand the context
• Align on the vision
• Organize the team
• Choose technologies
• Establish roadmap

Let’s be clear! This is not an imperative method, where you need to complete all the steps. It’s not just a toolbox either. The bootstrap gives you a structured approach, with the flexibility of adapting the workshops according to what you learn in the process. Some workshops we consider mandatory, some can be added in the process according to the needs.