Intro

These reflections and observations are based on my experiences in multiple projects and organization and heavily inspired by Alex Cowan’s Digital Product Management course.

What is agile?

Agile is the realization that change is inevitable. An organization should optimize for change and make change easy as possible. This does not only apply to technical aspects. It is just as important- if not more- in the organizational structure. After all you cannot escape the organization:

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure. — Melvin E. Conway 1 2

Just having agile is of limited value if these interact and deliver in a non-agile organization. What are some indicators of such? · The area of responsibility vs control of change that a team has. · Forced inter-team communications/collaboration.

Responsibility vs control

The mismatch between responsibility and control often manifests with teams that are responsible for a thin slice of layers, whether one layer or a few layers of a value chain and does not control enough of the vertical slice. This leads to the team being dependent on other teams for its day-to-day business and significantly blocks changes.

Excessive forced inter-team communication

Forced in the meaning that the team needs resources outside the team to do its job/purpose. It will not be practical or even desirable to eliminate this completely. If this is excessive then it is an indicator that the organization may benefit from changes.

Solutions

What not to do

Don’t do a massive reorganization. Especially if this is against the will of the affected persons. Have we not learned that huge, big-bang releases are bad?

What to do

We should approach this scientifically in a hypothesis-driven process, where we acquire information: both facts and opinions from team members and stakeholders and together state hypotheses. These will need to be tested as isolated and on as small scale as possible.
For your next multi-team project or initiative: can you create a team (if only temporarily) or an integrated working group and try to verify the desirability, viability and feasibility of the proposed feature, project, or product.

Try, learn and improve!