Exercises: Training and functioning of agile teams

Distinguish between technical skills (hard skills) and soft skills, give two examples of each type, and explain which type businesses value more today when hiring young people and why.

Teams typically pass through four stages: forming, storming, norming and performing. Describe in one sentence what happens in each stage and explain why the storming stage is not necessarily bad.

The figure shows the four stages a working team typically goes through. Identify the missing stage, marked with "?", and describe what happens during it.

An agile team in a software company works in two-week cycles, with 15-minute daily meetings and a board where all tasks are visible. Explain what these practices contribute compared to a traditional team that meets once a month.

In a newly created team, two members openly debate who should lead the group and how to divide up the tasks. State which stage the team is in and propose two specific actions by the leader to help overcome it.

An SME is unsure whether to invest 3 pesos 000 in training its staff in new digital tools. Analyse training as an investment: what benefits it can bring (productivity, motivation, lower staff turnover) and what risk it involves (that the trained employee leaves), and how you would evaluate whether it is worth it.

A start-up with a multidisciplinary team (design, programming, and sales) fails to meet deadlines: each person waits for someone else to finish first, and nobody sees the overall state of the work. Diagnose what the team is missing and propose three specific agile dynamics to organise the work, explaining what problem each one solves.

A communication consultancy with 20 employees incorporates generative artificial intelligence tools to automate report writing and preliminary data analysis. Management plans to cut the ongoing training budget in half, arguing: "AI already does the complex work; now we only need employees who follow software instructions and execute mechanical tasks."

1. a) Refute management's stance by justifying what type of human capital competencies increase in value compared to AI and which ones suffer rapid obsolescence.
2. b) Explain why cutting ongoing training weakens the company's competitive advantage in the medium term.
3. c) Design two specific training actions (reskilling or "upskilling") for the workforce and predict how they will impact the added value that the consultancy delivers to its clients.

Design an annual training plan for an SME of 12 people with a budget of $\$120\,000$: allocate the budget among at least three actions (technical training, soft skills, languages or others), justify the priority of each, and state how you would evaluate whether they have worked.