September 18, 2017 There are several methods to align teams working on related offerings. These tend to fall into one of two categories: 1) have teams align by having team level meetings (e.g., a bottom-up approach such as Scrum-of-Scrums) to keep teams aligned or 2) have a framework that specifies how to manage the work across all of the teams involved (e.g., a top-down workflow approach such as SAFe). Unfortunately, while both of these address a variety of issues and do assist alignment across the teams, they both miss the opportunity to align teams based on explicitly working on those specific stories that will assist in delivering business value faster. To accomplish this requires a different perspective on what the true goal of Agile is. This goal should be one of realizing business value faster, with predictability, sustainability and high quality. While the aforementioned approaches are consistent with this, they do not explicitly use it to align teams. This results in a pseudo alignment of teams that does not achieve the results both desired and possible. This seminar discussed how coming from the realization of business value can be used to provide a common goal across the organization and thereby allowing individual teams to optimize on the bigger picture instead of their own work. |
