Identify the Main Challenge
If you have already worked within an agile team, you will no doubt have noticed that generally speaking, smaller teams communicate better and are more productive. There are a number of reasons for this, but for this course, we will advise that a small team is less than 10 people. Many factors influence the “right” size for a team, which we will touch on later.
Conversely, the larger the team, the higher the number of communication channels between team members. In such cases, it becomes more difficult to build an environment based on trust and to share a common goal.
In order to combine complexity and speed while at the same time maintaining the optimal team size, you must build systems made up of several agile teams.
Rallying these teams around a common goal and optimizing their ability to work together, often to enhance a common solution with new features, is exactly what agility at scale can offer.
But collaboration between your teams alone raises some questions:
How should the functional scope be divided across several teams?
Who should be part of your teams? How can they be synchronized?
How should you align your teams for functional, methodological, and technical aspects?
How should you handle dependencies? To put it another way, how should the work of a team be coordinated when its output is a prerequisite for another team?
Should you add or remove agile roles, artifacts, or events to ensure better collaboration between your teams?
Answers to all of these questions can be found in:
Agile at scale principles, which define what needs to be done.
Agile at scale practices, which define how this should be done.
Agile at scale frameworks, which define work frameworks, or coherent sets of principles and practices combined that have proven themselves in the real world.
We will look at these answers together as we progress through the course. But first: here’s your mission!
Your mission is to support SoEasyHotel in its transition to agility at scale!
SoEasyHotel is a software publisher specializing in IT solutions for major hotel groups. As a market leader, the company provides a complete software suite made up of about ten components, allowing its users to handle their guest management and booking systems fully electronically.
SoEasyHotel faces fierce competition. To remain competitive and retain its position as a market leader, its executive committee has defined two strategic axes:
Rethinking their customer loyalty program.
Overhauling their customer journey to allow customers to make bookings more easily.
To support this strategy, SoEasyHotel must quickly deliver new features across the scope of the following two areas:
Fidelio
Component dedicated to the customer loyalty program.
Level of cross-team dependency: LOW.
Current system: 1 agile team.
UX-Booking
Component dedicated to customer journey.
Level of cross-team dependency: HIGH.
Current system: 2 agile teams.
The executive committee has approved additional funding to achieve its delivery objectives:
Fidelio: Doubling the current framework.
UX-Booking: Doubling the current framework.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to support SoEasyHotel in its acceleration strategy based on adopting agility at scale!
Over to You!
Fidelio, which is currently run by a single agile team, will have the benefit of backup from an additional team across the scope of the project.
Looking at the list of issues raised by collaboration across several teams, what recommendations come to mind for SoEasyHotel to target optimal collaboration between these two teams?
Answer Sheet
You can check your recommendations against our list of suggested answers (just a few of many possibilities!) to see what SoEasyHotel might do.
Let's Recap!
Building systems that rely on several agile teams allows you to combine speed and complexity when setting up your projects.
Agility at scale aims to facilitate collaboration between several teams in order to nurture and deliver a common but often complex solution.
But is this within your company's reach? What are the prerequisites for transitioning to agility at scale? We'll cover that in our next chapter!
