Understand how these multidisciplinary teams help a company to deliver more
By Antonio Costa< /h6>
We visit several areas and companies throughout our consulting process, whether in the product development, programming, human resources, financial, sales, business area, among others, and a very common question is:
Does the SQUAD format really work for organizing teams?If it works, is the way we’re doing it really effective? Is it possible to improve something?
Basically, SQUADs are an organizational structure of people of different abilities, who have a very clear objective: to have more value delivery. Different from the Traditional model, SQUADS are multidisciplinary teams, with fewer silos, less hierarchy, more autonomy, focused on their principles and objectives, that work to solve a problem or challenge within an organization.
Spotify created this model to solve a challenge they had in the time and, as it became popular, many people began to copy this format of organizing people. And so it became a herd, gained a giant proportion, many began to organize themselves in SQUADS, but without the slightest notion of Agility, of Product development, believing that having SQUADs already made them agile companies.
As there is no body that determines and regulates this issue, in this text, we will address this issue based on our experience on this issue.
The pillars for good SQUADs
But, in fact, what is the purpose behind them? As mentioned above, SQUADs are focused on maximizing the delivery of value, and for that, they are anchored by four pillars:
– Multidisciplinary team
They are made up of people with different abilities who, together, have the mission of solving problems in a certain area of the company or challenges in product development.
– Autonomy
Within a SQUAD, people have autonomy to say how they solve a given problem. It is very common to see teams in which the members only perform various actions that the boss determines. If there is still an external command with a lot of control, you are hurting this principle of autonomy inside a SQUAD.
The idea is to bring people of different abilities together in a team, making it as productive and creative as possible, giving autonomy to these people to solve a problem.
– Clear objective
None of this works if the goals are not clear! That’s right. It is necessary to have the purpose of this initiative very explicit: “which problem must be solved?”.
– Restrictions
These limits should be created so that people can do what they want, as long as they don’t violate any of these restrictions. Some common restrictions are: setting a time to create and develop that product; or amount of money; or even a restriction that does not violate the organization’s principles.
The SQUAD concept comes from squad, platoon – just like in a war room – you assemble a squad, in which “mission given is mission accomplished”. In other words, a SQUAD on the first day of work is practically a “war room”: you bring people of different abilities together, with a very clear purpose, give some restand they work to solve that problem.
But can you scale this format to every organization?
Yes! The Spotify model suggests several ways to solve a very complex problem, with several SQUADS, through other structures such as tribes, chapters and guilds. .. But that yields another article! If you want to know more about how this scaling part of the Spotify model works, leave your suggestion here in the comments that we can say yes about it!
In addition to all the scaling techniques, Spotify’s SQUAD model also has a series of principles such as:
Waste aversion – where they continually seek improvement points to avoid wasting time or money;
100% predictability equals zero percent innovation – that is, if you want to do something really innovative, you can’t be totally predictable… You have to allow people to fail, or failure to be better viewed , as long as it stops in search of solving that particular problem;
Among other principles…
If you want to know more about the principles, leave your suggestion here in the comments and we can talk about it too!
Don’t try to fit into a template!
The big message I want to leave to finish this text is from an error I saw in a company and that I should bring here to exemplify something you should not do: just change the name from “team” to “squad” and do not incorporate really the principles that the model has.
Aren’t you also trying to fit your area or business into a box, in a ready-made format?Do not copy Spotify! Understand the principles, purposes and learn with him to create YOUR MODEL, the one that best matches your reality. Spotify itself would not use this model today, as they learned with this format, used various techniques such as Scrum, Kanban and were adapting it to use it in the way that fits best today, always focusing on the goal of develop good products, efficiently and effectiveness.
You want to achieve these results, like Spotify, be more digital and deliver more value to your organization, but you don’t know where to start, we help you!
