Structure – IT Center of Excellence & Agile Service Delivery

The organizational structure forms the backbone for how your Agile enterprise will operate. The business architecture, the technology architecture, and the organizational chart inform the structure. We’re constantly looking for opportunities to encapsulate, decouple, and minimize orchestration costs. Often, this means organizing around business capabilities, value streams, and other major groupings within the organization.

Team Structure

Agile organizations are built around Agile teams. The first step is to develop a plan for forming teams that can stay together over time. Not all Agile teams, though, are Scrum teams. We’ll need Product Category, Product Line, and Delivery Teams to do Agile at scale effectively.

Product Category Team

A Product Category Team is a group of leaders responsible for identifying business needs, approving funding, and establishing time, cost, and scope constraints. This team is cross-functional like all the other teams and meets on a regular cadence to move high-level work items through the System of Delivery. This team resolves prioritization concerns, makes high-level tradeoffs, and applies resources to constraints to improve flow when bottlenecks are identified.

Product Line Team

This team exists to understand the Product Category Team’s business needs while breaking Epics into Features and Features into User Stories. The team maximizes the flow of value across Delivery Teams while accelerating risk reduction and the validation of assumptions. A significant role this team plays is the early identification of cross-cutting concerns, impediments, dependencies, and other issues that can’t be easily resolved.

These teams are formed around a Product Line or business capability area. They provide clarity through a well-defined backlog and hold teams accountable to make and meet commitments. The Product Line helps ensure the Delivery Teams have everyone and everything necessary while showing measurable progress by facilitating the demonstration of integrated features and providing timely information to the Product Category Team.

Delivery Team

The Delivery Team is responsible for creating the Story tasks from the Features and Stories. Work is done to complete the Story and/or Feature so that it meets the definition of done. Teams have a set of roles. The roles are guidelines to help the team deliver on their responsibilities. A person may hold more than one role as long as the team can keep its commitments. The Delivery Team as a whole is responsible for collaborating to achieve these responsibilities.

A Delivery Team is staffed similarly to a Product Team and consists of developers, testers, analysts, and other specialists who may be required to deliver against their product backlog. This team can also use Scrum or Kanban as their process model.