The Continuous Agile Re-Organization Cycle

The Need to Constantly Evolve Your Organizing Structures

As I mentioned over the course of my book, if you want to foster organizational structure that increases agility, then you want to grow your organization's ability to re-organize around the value. We want to encourage teaming to take place where high collaboration is required to create the most value for our Organization.

Like this article? read more in my book on Agile Organizational Design

Agile At the Team Level Is an Act of Constant Re-Organization

Agile is not only that, but constant re-organization is a key part in my opinion. Let;s look at the day / week in the life of a stereotypical agile team.

• At the beginning of the week the team collaborates with each other and external stakeholders to prioritize the next set of work to accomplish for the week, creating a backlog for the team
• The team then goes through the backlog, and iteratively grooms each piece of work, defining acceptance criteria, fleshing out details, perhaps agreeing on an estimate, decomposing it. etc
• The team then meets frequently, perhaps daily, perhaps more often, to agree on how to do the work, how to collaborate or pair up on individual work items
• pairs are soften witched as needed based on availability and capability, team members pinch hit to help each other out
• At the end of the week the team reviews what was accomplished with each other and stakeholders
• The team will take time to reflect on how they could have planned and delivered the work differently in an attempt to improve the way they work.

Even within an individual team, we see members re-configuring dynamically into twos and threes and fours as necessary to accomplish the team's overall goals. The following agile artifacts and practices help team members continually reorganize to meet the demands of the day

• Visible Backlogs allow teams and stakeholders to get organized around the highest priorities
• Team Events / Ceremonies provide a means for team members and their stakeholders to both plan and review at a frequent, steady cadences
• Visual Work Management makes it easier for the team to agree on how to divide into sub groups / pairs for individual work items
• Definitions Of Done allow team members to work with a common understanding of what is expected in terms of work quality and completeness, so that the team can operate with consistency

Armed with these, or similar practices, team members are equipped to operate what I call The Agile Re-Organization Cycle. Team members self-organize in the most effective way that can to accomplish the goal of the team.

Scale The Agile Re-Organization Cycle By Adapting Behavior to suit the Program / Portfolio Level

The concept of organizing and re-organizing around value scales, up to what limit I do not know. Personally I have seen it scale up to Programs and Portfolios with almost 200 Full time folks, what I would call a large Agile ecosystem. My own experience tells me that a dedicated planning and re-organizing effort is better accomplished with smaller groups, say 30 - 50 people, It is certainly much easier at this number.

We can scale what is traditionally thought up of as a team level act of re-organization by taking what are typically considered team level practices, and of behaviors that can be applied at larger scale.

In my next article, I will paint a picture of how to accomplish re-organization at larger scale using each of these practices.

Like this article? read more in my book on Agile Organizational Design