 I'm Nicole Ritchie, obviously not the one on the left, I'm the one on the right. I'm a project manager at AMAZI.io and I'm also a Drupal South committee member. I would like to tell you a little bit more about creating high-performing teams today. Unfortunately, we've only got 10 minutes, so I'm just going to dive in. It's a very high-level overview, I'll be in the AMAZI booth all day, so if you have any questions, just come and see me. You've probably all wondered what qualities high-performing teams share. Today, I'd just like to give you a high-level overview of two proven and practical techniques to develop an effective team and drive performance. The first one I'd like to introduce you to is Professor Richard Hackman. He says no leader can make a team perform well, but all leaders can create conditions that increase the likelihood that it will. So in 2002, Professor Hackman came up with a method or described six conditions that he reckons from research that represent the main features of a team. So every team needs a very solid foundation, which is the essentials, which is a real team. The people should be dedicated. It shouldn't just be randomly put together. It should be team tasks and everyone should actually know what the collective outcome should be and the roles and responsibilities need to be clear. So the team should be stable for a prolonged period of time. And then it's also important to have the right people. Make sure that your team has technical as well as soft skills to be able to bring the best out in each other and also to work collaboratively. And then the team should have a compelling direction. Why are we doing this? Where are we going? What's the bigger picture? Don't just give me small tasks. You need to make sure that the whole team is following a common goal. And roles and responsibilities need to be clear. And also the work should be challenging. Make sure it's challenging, but also obviously don't overload the team. Make sure that the work that needs to be achieved is possible. And then also the work is consequential. The team should be aware that your effort that you put in is also or has an impact on the success of the team as well as the organisation. And once we've got the essentials or solid foundation, we can then move into the team environment and look at providing an enabling structure. Have the right size team. Hackman says a team shouldn't be more than eight people and also have a written code of conduct. Make sure that everyone has meaningful tasks and we all follow a common strategy. And then also make sure that you provide the right support to the team as their training material, as their right education, and then also that feeds into the coaching. Hackman says that you don't need to, when you, at the start of a project, you don't need to have every skill set in your team that you'll need to achieve your goal. Start with a smaller team and then provide coaching and provide experts that team can turn to. This is just a summary of what I was just explaining what the conditions are and the criteria. I just left it in the slides so people can later follow up. The next thing I'd like to look at are the stages of team development. The person I'd like to introduce you here is Bruce Tuckman. He is best known for his five stages of group development known as the forming, storming, norming and performing theory. And that was developed in 1965. Let's look into the different conditions into a bit more detail. So Tuckman says that every team starts with a forming phase where everyone's on their best behavior, everyone's getting to know each other, everyone's making an effort, everyone brings different experience to the team. Some team members may be excited about that coming work and others may be really anxious. Usually in the forming phase there's a lack of clarity and it's really, really important for this grandmaster or team leader to have clear guidance and develop the roles and responsibilities together with the team. This phase is also like if you use project management tools then you might want to look at a team charter in the forming stage. The next stage is the storming. So that's when team members start testing the boundaries. They're starting to get to know each other. Everyone, like I said before, everyone brings a different experience. Everyone brings different baggage and there might be quite a bit of conflict in this phase. It's also a phase where people don't know each other too well so you might still be focusing on your own task and achievement rather than actually the group goals. And it's really important in this phase that we identify goals for the team so that everyone can move into the right direction or into the same direction. The next stage is the norming phase where team members really know each other. There might be some team building in this phase that trust and respect grows and you start resolving issues amongst the teams. And also they usually start appreciating each other's skills and knowledge and turn to each other. However in this phase there might still be a lot of conflict or there might still be problems or issues so the team is not actually at its best performance level yet because they're still trying to sort of issues. And in this phase it's also really important to give constructive feedback and also support each other. And then we're getting to the performing phase. This is a phase where you know all the friction everything should actually be resolved. There's a high level of trust. There's people respect each other and they motivate each other and they also turn to each other when they have questions. Which means for the scrum master or for the team lead you can take a step back and there's no supervision needed because the structure and processes work really well. If there are sometimes it happens that a team falls back into a previous stage and this is when the team leader steps in and provides coaching or support to be able to get back into better performing rhythm. And it's obviously also in this phase it's also very important to celebrate the successes and not just rush from one stressful event into the next or from one stressful sprint to the next. It's really important to celebrate your successes. And then in 1977 he also added that journeying phase which is really just important when you run a project with one team and then everyone goes into separate directions. Which means that in this phase that most goals have been accomplished. The emphasis is on wrapping up and team members start being reassigned to other tasks. And this is just to visualise the effectiveness. And it's really important that especially the scrum masters and team leads are aware of the different phases of team building to be aware that if the team is in a storming phase and going through issues and problems that the effectiveness is not quite as good as it should be. So you really need to look at the different conditions and help the team to reach the next phase. Cool. All right. We've only got 30 seconds left. So I'll just have a quick chat into the Q&A to see if there are any questions. But I'll be in the amazing booth all day. So please come and see me. You're also more than welcome to email me or reach out on Twitter. I don't actually think we've got time for questions. So just come and see me in the booth.