Plan, commit, execute, and improve together with a Team of Agile Teams (#12)

"Team of teams is not a target state, but rather an opportunity for value creation and delivery" - Stephan Neck

As an SPC or other agile change agent, how do you bring the Team of Agile Teams dimension of SAFe's Team and Technical Agility competency to life in your organization? In this episode, Ali, Stephan, Niko, and Mark continue in their quest to provide insight and inspiration by sharing their personal journeys and war stories from the field.

Mark hosts and begins by asking Ali, Stephan, and Niko to describe their first ART and their worst ART and the lessons they learned from both. Niko takes the opportunity to remind us that we're dealing with a living organism, not a machine, which makes a great segue to the secrets we've all found regarding ART design. Ali provides an excellent foundation for this discussion as he shares the story of an ART that took ten weeks to design. Getting an ART designed and launched is only the beginning of the journey, though, and we move on to critical moves to setting it up for self-sustaining success and avoiding the perils of the feature factory.

The Measure and Grow debate is less divided this week. Ali, Mark, and Stephan all settled for "The ART being organized to optimize value delivery" as their favorite, and Niko provided the only contrast with his love of the trust required when "Our team can rely on the other teams to deliver work on which we are dependent."

Cast:
Stephan Neck
Ali Hajou 
Niko Kaintantzis
Mark Richards (Moderator)

Show Notes

Book References:

• Artful Making - by Robert Austin, Lee Devin
• Scaling Software Agility - Dean Leffingwell

Other References:

• 12 signs you're working in a feature factory - John Cutler