March 26th, 2024
Q: What are your pro-tips for avoiding agile teams from siloing themselves from the rest of the organisation?
A: Realising that teams are only healthy when they conform into highly effective groups that actually get work done. This means creating small groups of two to three people working together. It doesn’t have to be the purest pair programming, but teams will have difficulty functioning unless they are getting into those twos or threes and getting something done, tested, and getting quick feedback.
These small, effective teams are the breeding ground for broader team collaboration. Ecosystems are the breeding ground for figuring out your team. In an ecosystem, you get 50 solid technology knowledge workers, and even in an enterprise setting, with all the right people together you can tackle a pretty big outcome or program. Some outcomes are too big, but you can get a solid amount of customer-facing work done with a team size of 30-80 people.
When you develop cadences around each team (organised by anybody on the team, not just the product owner or scrum master) to meet twice a week, with or without higher level visualisations. But, teams are going to meet a couple of times a week to ensure that the backlog is managed at least at an options and outcomes level cohesively and prioritised in a cohesive way, and integrated. Which is why thin slicing is so powerful. Thin slicing can happen at a program level where you could look at what every team is working on in the program and how they contribute to the next things list. It scales really nicely.
However, many things tend to get complicated because many people are afraid of getting out of the agile team. What happens is that you have designed a perfect agile model, then something changes and work starts getting moved to multiple teams because the work was not what you thought it would be or wasn’t designed to minimise handoffs in the first place. So, what you want to try to do is to build resilience in your team members, so they are comfortable moving teams to where their work is. Go to the team stand-up that actually cares what you are working on.
You can make a good set of friends at 15 to 20 and have a reasonable set of connections up to 50, both in your personal and work social circumstances. So, building social cohesion at that 50-person level gives you that dynamism that you need in your teams.
One of the things that we are also doing at Scotiabank, which I’m really proud of is we are gonna have two classes of ecosystems. The first one is what they are calling Domain ecosystems, which is a known business such as customer experience and new technology, but everyone knows what payments and capital markets are. They are relatively stable. Then they are creating the new Edge ecosystems which are trying to digitise all your products onboarding across all your teams. Typically, that would go to 30,000 different agile teams in your business, but we decided not to do that anymore. If you want to do a cross-cutting initiative, we are going from cross-functional teams to cross-organizational teams. Part of getting funding for a big crazy project is what is the T model, and that is where you make those big disruptive changes so that how people come together proceeds your business model or they are moving in lockstep. If you want to do something innovative and brand new then the organising model has to move with that change.