Work Should Fit People
This week, we launched the Humanizing Work Show. In episode 1, we summarize what we mean by Humanizing Work and where the phrase came from. Humanizing Work…
Category: Organizational Design
Scrum as an agent of culture change
Peter Drucker invented most modern management practices. He was an in-demand coach to hundreds of top leaders in the world’s largest organizations. When he suggested that “culture…
Scrum as an agent of culture change part 2
In part one of this series, we defined culture. We also described why it is both critical and hard to work on. Finally, we left…
Reinventing Organizations Video now with Korean subtitles
Thanks to Hahn Ryu of D.CAMP, our video describing Frederic Laloux’s book Reinventing Organizations and its application for lean and agile adoption is now available…
Early Agile Scaling at Adobe
Scaling agile is a hot topic these days. I’ve recently given a presentation at a few local user groups about the experience of scaling agile at…
The future of agile: changing the world of work
I gave a presentation at the Scrum Gathering in Phoenix AZ about the historic context of Agile and Scrum, and where we are headed next.…
Laloux Cultural Model and Agile Adoption
I had invested years of my life in a ground up, large-scale agile adoption. The early years of the adoption seemed to go at breakneck…
Life Change Starts with Clarity
There are moments where each one of us have wished for significant life change – this could be related to our current circumstances, our jobs,…
Viktor Frankl’s Meaning Triangle for Organizations
Viktor Frankl was an incredible human being, having survived the Holocaust and establishing logotherapy, a type of psychotherapy. His book, Man’s Search for Meaning, details…
Org Structure, Software Architecture, and Cross-functional Teams
Some 46 years ago, Melvin Conway wrote, “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of…
This dynamic leads to one of the major points of friction for established organizations trying to become agile:
When your organization and architecture have settled into a highly-specialized, component-oriented structure, it can be very difficult to form cross-functional teams who can work on deep vertical slices of your system. There may be no combination of 9 people to make a Scrum team who can work on the whole stack. And without such teams, it can be very difficult to achieve many of the agile values and principles (e.g. frequent delivery and feedback, responding to change, customer collaboration).
Addressing this requires short- and long-term action.
In the long term, you want to get cross-functional teams, but you probably don’t have the skills and knowledge in your team members to pull it off. This means cross-training to grow people’s skills to cover more of your system. Cross-training requires slack. You’ll need to over-staff teams—or allow teams to pull less work than their full delivery capacity—so people have time to learn new areas rather than trying to maximize efficiency in delivering what they already know.
In the short term, you want to get as cross-functional as you can.
Suppose you have a group of 25 people working on the same product. Different people have become experts in different areas of the system. Now, you’re adopting Scrum, so you need to find 3–4 cross-functional teams who can deliver high-value features all the way to done. Ideally, any of the teams should be able to pull any item from the backlog. It looks like this:
So, what do you do?
First, you need to define what “high-value features” and “all the way to done” mean in your context. The Product Owner should be able to to present a product vision and the top several sprints of a Product Backlog. The Product Owner and team should be able to