The First Thing to Build: Leveraging Trust on Agile Teams

Diana Larsen (FutureWorks Consulting, LLC)

Talking Heads · Customer, Individuals & Teams

Monday, 16:00, 1 hour 30 minutes | Grand Ballroom North

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Trust forms the bedrock of self-organizing Agile teams and provides the foundation for team processes. How do Agile teams confront this paradox? Teams need trust, but trust takes time to build. With an understanding of how trust grows, teams can stimulate and accelerate trustworthiness and trusting among team members and between the team and other important stakeholders. In this session, team members and team leaders will learn: a definition of professional trust, a model for team interactions that leverages trust, ways to recognize when a team has “trust issues,” and skills that help teams develop greater trust. To quote author and agile SCM blogger, Brad Appleton, “Maybe the first and most important thing that an agile development project builds is trust!”

A specialist in the human side of software development, Diana Larsen expands teams’ capabilities to interact, self-organize, and improve project performance. She co-authored Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great (Pragmatic Programmers, 2006) with Esther Derby. Clients come to Diana because of her experience and expertise; they stick with her because of her candor, compassion and courage. She leads group processes for collaborative thinking and planning, as well as guiding teams through project retrospectives. She presents workshops, speaks and writes on self-organizing team development and team leadership, innovation development, leading retrospectives and influencing organizational change. A former board member of the Agile Alliance, Diana works with a wide network of colleagues. She co-founded the International Retrospective Facilitators Gathering and the Agile Open Northwest 2007 conference.