One-man Bands

Team leader assigns each team member a separate personal task. Briefs them individually and controls the progress independently.
Team members are working on the tasks in parallel without much interaction with each other until the integration stage of the project.
One-man Bands - Teamleadsky
How does this anti-pattern impact the team?
  • Impact
    The main reason why companies invest heavily in teamwork is achieving the effect of synergy. When several people working together towards a shared goal create larger outcomes, compared to the same number of people working separately. By placing each team member in their own separate world team leader eliminates the conditions for achieving synergy. As well the design gaps often backfire in the integration stage.

    This anti-pattern impairs the ability of the team to Deliver.
How can you spot this anti-pattern?
  • Signals
    • "I am always achieving my Sprint Goal."
    • "We can't take care of this, there are too many tasks in progress."
    • "Make sure, that after the Sprint Planning there are no unassigned tasks left."

    These signals are the "red flags", that indicate it is worth taking a closer look to check whether the anti-pattern is present.
Let's review this anti-pattern on different levels:
  • Events
    On the level of events we can say: "It took ages to fix a bug while one of the team members was on holidays".
  • Patterns
    On the level of patterns we can observe the following: "Team leader usually assigns the tasks during the planning, and team members don't know much about each other's part of the project."
  • Systems
    On the level of systems we can state that "By assigning each team member a personal focus area, the team initially gains more velocity, however when comes the need for changes across several focus areas, the velocity drops significantly due to knowledge gaps and design discrepancies."
One-man Bands - Teamleadsky
  • Mental Models
    On the level of mental models we might recognize, that we hold e.g. the following assumption: "In order to move fast we must maximize the use of every team member's working time."
Written by Alex
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