Agile Basketball / Agile NBA

Self-organization is a fundamental concept in Agile Basketball. Self-organization does not mean that players instead of managers control the team strategy and execution. Nor does it mean letting players do whatever they want to do. It means that management commits to guiding the evolution towards synergy, which emerges from the interaction of players, committed to team goals and learning through inspection, adaptation, self-organization and empiricism. The analyst clarifies to player what the team objectives are for each five game Sprint, and players (along with the analyst and assistant coach guidance) determine how they will add value. But they are nonetheless self-organizing, with influence from those who can assist them in achieving the team goal (such as analyst creating ways of measuring value and the team lead adopting new offensive/defensive strategies). The player’s job is to self-organize around team challenges, boundaries, and constraints identified by the analyst or player ...

The team must frequently inspect their performance analytics and progress toward their Sprint Goals and overall goal to detect performance variances. Inspections should be frequent and performed by the analyst. Inspections are most beneficial when performed regularly and decisions are based on a combination of analytics and expert judgment. The body of work for inspection should be at least one Sprint (or 5 game stretch). http://www.agilebasketball.org

Synergy is the state that every team should strive to reach and maintain. Synergy is the collective ability for all team members to be able to interpret in real time the opponents’ game plan and know exactly how each team member will react, based on the team philosophy and game situation. Synergy occurs when a team learns which strategies are most effective for their unique makeup and how to work as a single unit to achieve the team goals. Agile Basketball helps teams identify these strategies and achieve synergy faste http://www.agilebasketball.org

If the analyst identifies one or more areas of their goals deviate outside acceptable limits (defined at the beginning of the process), and the resulting performance is unacceptable, the strategy must be adjusted. An adjustment must be made immediately to minimize goal deviation. Agile Basketball consists of four key events which drive inspection, adaptation, self-organization and synergy. These events are described in Agile Basketball Events section of this document: ⦁ Sprint Planning Session ⦁ Post-Game Meeting ⦁ Sprint Review Session ⦁ Sprint Retrospective http://www.agilebasketball.org

The core of Agile Basketball’s adaptation and decision making process is data and analytics. The program must fully commit to discovering new ways of interpreting data and creating value. Value refers to measurable results as they contribute to and/or impact the overall goals of the team. Value is discovered through empiricism and evolutionary analytics performed and inspected incrementally. http://agilebasketball.org

At the end of each Sprint, the team looks at the performance goals reached and adds up the number of value points associated with those achieved metrics. The total number of value points gained is the team’s velocity, or production on the court, for that Sprint. After the first few Sprints, the analyst will start to see a trend and will be able to calculate the average velocity. The value point system will allow players to track their progress with a single number, and it encourages them to aim for more key metrics in an effort to accumulate value points in the Sprint and gain velocity. Players see their value based on points accumulated by hitting performance targets rather than scoring points. The average velocity is the total number of value points gained, divided by the total number of Sprints completed. http://agilebasketball.org/monitoring-progress/