Unlocking Team Potential using 3V
Explore 3V and see how mastering the balance between Value, Velocity, and Vitality is key to moving teams from surviving to thriving.
In today’s high-speed, high-stress work environments, maintaining a balanced approach to work is more crucial than ever. A growing number of individuals and teams are feeling stressed, burned out, and disengaged from their work. Ensuring they’re delivering value and taking their vitality into account has become key to creating a balanced, healthy workplace. 3V is a useful way for teams to quickly assess their operational health and effectiveness. By expanding our focus beyond velocity, 3V helps identify impediments that limit success and fosters a more balanced, healthy workplace.
What is 3V?
3V stands for Value, Velocity, and Vitality. It's an alliteration mnemonic that emphasises the critical areas of focus for building successful teams, products and organisations. 3V is designed to easily integrate into your current operational flow and encourages an ongoing bias to positive action.
Value - Focusing on what's important.
Question: Am I delivering value?
Answer: My effectiveness.
Velocity - Playing the game at pace.
Question: Am I working efficiently?
Answer: My productivity.
Vitality - Ensuring we stay the distance.
Question: Is my approach sustainable?
Answer: My health.
In its simplest form, 3V uses a self-assessment survey to answer these questions using a Likert scale or similar survey scale. As teams gain insights from their use of 3V, some have found it useful to extend the questions and use data driven metrics for a more detailed analysis.
Why the Triangle Metaphor?
These focus areas of 3V are both complementary and competing, highlighting the tension that exists between them. This tension is crucial for achieving success and must be visibly managed through active prioritisation. The equilateral triangle serves as a metaphor to visualise and strive for balance. There is a sweet spot within the triangle that represents a sustainable work environment and continuous performance improvement.
Who Benefits from 3V?
Designed for self-assessment by individuals and teams, 3V provides early indications of progress, success, and impediments that require action. It is valuable for coaches, leaders, and governance bodies, as the results can:
Highlight areas needing support to remove obstacles.
Celebrate successes and reassure stakeholders of progress.
How to Implement 3V?
3V can be integrated into various team activities and reporting processes:
Daily Standup - assess team performance, value delivery, and team morale.
Retrospective - Celebrate wins, prioritise impediments and track corrective actions.
Monitoring - Summarise answers for each of the 3Vs over time to ensure a balanced work environment is being maintained on an ongoing basis at each level of the organisation.
Reporting - Incorporate 3V results into existing team reporting to keep stakeholders informed.
Want to Experiment with 3V?
Consider conducting a brief 3V experiment during your next team workshop. Survey your team to identify which 'V'—Value, Velocity, or Vitality—could most significantly improve with focused effort. Once decided, visibly integrate an improvement action into your team’s backlog. At your following workshop, review and discuss this action to test whether it has had a positive impact on your team’s productivity and overall well-being.
Although created a decade ago to enhance agile software development, 3V is helping individuals and teams across various fields maintain a healthy balance between productivity and well-being, and is proving more important than ever in today’s challenging work climate.
Want Help?
Reach out if you would like help facilitating your initial 3V team experiment or would like to know more about how we have used 3V to grow healthy, high-performing teams.
We have recently extended 3V for effective agile governance, designing controls that can be readily used by traditional governance groups with little or no agile experience. These controls provide real-time insights into performance and long-term success of an agile initiative.
Version 1 - updated on 22 May 2024
I would love to talk more - please feel free to get in touch via LinkedIn or agilePete@agilecolab.com.
