Getting Started 

There are several steps to get started with the Whole Team practice.

Understand the underlying philosophies behind this practice. These philosophies are captured in the Self-Organize Work Assignments, Maintain a Sustainable Pace, and Daily Meetings guidelines. 

Discuss the implications of this practice with management. The Whole Team practice often requires changes to the way that projects are managed and governed because "whole teams" are often more self-contained than traditional project teams. For example, with self-organization detailed planning is typically performed at the beginning of each iteration in a just-in-time manner and not at the beginning of the project. The implication is that management will receive different and often better quality artifacts at different points in time than from project teams which do not adopt this practice.

Discuss this practice with your team. The concept of maintaining a sustainable pace is often attractive to team members. But are they comfortable with self organization? Are they comfortable with sharing their current status in daily meetings? Do they appreciate how a whole team approach can improve their overall productivity?

Identify viable aspects of this practice for your situation. Your team may not be able to adopt all aspects of this practice. For example, if your project is a high-priority "emergency" project, perhaps you will not be able to adopt a sustainable pace in the short term.

Prioritize your adoption efforts. Some project teams can adopt this practice all at once, while other teams find that they need to ease into self-organization or into daily meetings. Adopt the aspects which are easy for your team right away, and then adopt the other aspects one or two at a time as appropriate over a period of several weeks.

Common Pitfalls

There are several common pitfalls that project teams run into when adopting this practice.

Traditional project management culture

In many ways the whole team practice is all about pushing many management activities into the hands of the people who do the actual work, a philosophy that goes against the grain in some organizations. For example, your organization may have a belief system where "managers do the planning, the rest of the staff does what they are told" or a "estimation should be left to estimators". You will need to overcome that kind of belief system when adopting this practice.    

Insufficient time to change

It can take weeks, if not months, for experienced professionals to get used to some of the aspects of this practice, in particular daily meetings and self organization. You cannot expect people to change overnight. 

Individuals struggle at first to see the "whole team"

Many people, in particular specialists, are used to working on their own and not part of an overall team. Worse yet, they often struggle to understand why it is important to do so. For example, you may hear people ask why they need to participate in a daily meeting when a weekly status report is easier to write. They do not realize that it is critical for everyone on the entire team to understand people's status, not just the manager. Although the individual might be proceeding effectively on one task, they might not realize that several others are being blocked by their lack of progress on other tasks which they haven't gotten to yet.