Each team is unique, and each team has unique internal processes and best practices. However, some general concepts are widespread, so any new team can use them. Let us see these standard best practices.

General vs. Specialized Activities

Most of the team activities can be split into two groups — general and specialized.

General activities are actions that can be performed by any team member. These can be an organization of meetups, buying cookies and snacks, or filling the standard weekly reports.

Specialized activities are operations that require specific experience, and only some team members are suitable for them. Many technical or business-related activities are often considered as specialized.

A good team should work on converting specialized activities into general ones. The main idea of this experience sharing is to raise qualification, simplify internal processes, and improve internal communication. Besides that, such a practice can decrease the bus-factor and make the team more reliable and productive from a long-term perspective.

Responsibilities And Roles

Each team member may have multiple responsibilities and roles. These two things define what this member can and should do.

Responsibilities describe the specific work activities that a team member has to perform. They often include only direct expectations of what a person has to do — these are primary responsibilities. There are also secondary responsibilities not described directly but still required to do the work properly.

Roles define what a person can do in general or inside a team. Roles are often used to fill specific positions inside a team to build proper internal processes and achieve expected results.

Most of the responsibilities are often not unique and can be shared with other team members fully or partially. Roles can define which responsibilities a person can handle based on role description and required qualification. It is good to have at least two team members with each role to balance the load, have quick feedback, and share knowledge and experience across the team.

Trial And Error

Every good team has to work on improving its internal processes and overall performance continuously. There are many ways to do that, but work on activities, responsibilities, and roles can be a great start.

A team may try different ways to organize their work and regular activities to achieve the best results. Not all of them may be good, but the negative experience is still an experience, and it can be used to make conclusions on how to do the work and used them in the future.

Team members may try to introduce changes at the beginning of every iteration (sprint), then analyze the results at the end of the iteration, and then decide if they want to add this change to everyday routine. Every person may propose a way to improve teamwork, try to implement is during the test iteration, and then provide a report at the end of the iteration to summarize the result. Such an approach does allow you to adjust to changes quickly and also maintains overall team flexibility and excellent performance.