You can start me up

How to build a sequoiaDeliver value, be lean and agile, scale up if you must

Tom Heisterkamp

(tom.heisterkamp@hotmail.com)

https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=41450043

https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/107348094571122106502

Thursday, November 5, 2015

Which team serves the customer?

Customer Y

needs

product or

feature x

?

Front

Office

Team

Back

Office

Team

C1 C2 C3

C4 C5 C6

C7 C8 C9

Feature or component teams?

Requirements - BA

RA

Design - AR

Build - Bld

Test, QA - Tst

SIT

Acceptance - Sme

Operations - Ops

Feature

Feature X

Feature Y

PM

Feature Z - ..

Maximize feature teams

C1

F7

F3

F8

F1

F6

F2

F5

F4

Advice:

- Maximize # feature teams

- external customer focus

- Component teams

acting as supporting

- (No code owners)

- Internal coordination

between PO’s

- Break up teams through

(area) PO’s e.g. on C1

- Create component

guardians

Internal open source

Team Elm Team Oak

Henrik Kniberg

A B

System

Organization x

Conway’s law (1968)

Customer Y

needsServes

user Y

Front

office

Mid

office

Back

OfficeSupport

“Any organization that designs a system (defined more broadly here

than just information systems) will inevitably produce a design whose

structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.”

Value stream

Jan Vlietland

Dunbar’s number

• Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of

people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships;

• These are relationships in which an individual knows who each

person is and how each person relates to every other person;

• This number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin

Dunbar, who found a correlation between primate brain size and

average social group size;

• By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from

the results of primates, he proposed that

humans can only comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships;

• Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally

require more restrictive rules, laws, and enforced norms to

maintain a stable, cohesive group. It has been proposed to lie

between 100 and 230, with a commonly used value of 150.

Back

office

Team

Front

office

Team

Mid

office

Team

… fixing multiple component teams ?

Integration

team

Design

team

Team

Willow

Team

Elm

Team

Oak

… fixing multiple feature teams?

Integration

team

Design

team

Henrik KnibergLean from the trenches

Traditional and Agile organizations

Ag

ilit

y

High

Low

SizeSmall large

C.

Agile

Start-up

A.

Traditional

Niche

B.

Traditional

Dinosaurs

D.

Agile

Giants

Scale Up

Scaling starts with two teams …

and then four …

then eleven, first top level support

more support, more teams (22)

Division Red goes for it (44)

Division Red infects the others …

whole organization becomes agile.

This is the end, my only friend the

end

The best moment to plant a tree was twenty years ago,

the second best moment is now.

(African proverb)