Article Series: Part 4: Team Design Strategy – Workshop

A pattern for Team Design strategy & self-Formation Workshop events

In this series of articles, Agile Rising’s Scaled Agile experts have introduced and provided recommendations on peer-reviewed and field-tested ideas and patterns for organizing around value while using SAFe as guidance. The patterns include critical features of value stream management, SAFe principles, Design Thinking, Agile, organizational change management & design, industrial and organizational psychology, team design strategy, team topologies, team formation & self-selection, and applied Lean and Systems Thinking.

Series Article Topics

Team Design Strategy – The Workshop (WIP Draft)

March 20, 2024 - Marshall Guillory, Scaled Agile SPCT, Enterprise Agility Coach

In the previous article we discussed the mindset changes necessary and the activities and prep work that must be done prior to and during the Team Design Strategy Workshop (TDSW). This article is all about the mechanics of the workshop and how to successfully prepare for and facilitate the event to ultimately form an organizational design hypothesis.

Overview of SAFe workshops and Agile Rising workshops to help teams organize around value

The Team Design Strategy Workshop and complementary Team Formation Workshop are collaborative events that help organize the ART into cross-functional, value stream aligned, high-performing Agile teams.

The Team Design Strategy Workshop provides the time and space for representative emergent knowledge groups – customer centric, managers, and team members – to collaborate on alternative designs for the ART’s teams and how the teams will organize around value in the system. The emergent knowledge groups work collaboratively to create alternative Agile team design strategy options using Design Thinking.

A team design strategy is a deliberate plan or approach for forming and managing a team of individuals to accomplish a specific goal or task.

The goal of the workshop is to create the notional organizational design hypothesis and plan for organizing around value for the ART. Team Design Strategy occurs after the organization has completed the SAFe Value Stream and ART Identification Workshop where the operational and development value streams and people groups in the value stream network have been identified.

The Team Design Strategy Workshop’s output is a notional team design strategy for specific proposed ART Teams, Suppliers, and Systems & Shared Services teams as an organizational design hypothesis, including topologies recommended, and an agreement on how to organize the Agile Teams on the ART and the steps needed to achieve this – the plan. This output becomes the critical input into the Team Formation Workshop.

The 8 Step Pattern

The following eight step TDSW pattern will help your organization explore in detail what activities you will need to include in your workshops.

  1. Conducting Discovery to understand the hierarchy and existing Flow, communication channels, and culture
  2. Defining the value stream network scope and objectives
  3. Identifying Value Streams for the Products and making value flow without interruptions
  4. Identifying the skills and expertise needed to achieve the goals
  5. Using Design Thinking to Understand Flow Problems, Opportunities
  6. Establishing clear roles and responsibilities for each team member
  7. Creating a communication and decision-making framework that supports effective collaboration
  8. Providing resources and support to help the team achieve its goals
Understanding the big picture of SAFe workshops and Agile Rising Workshops to help teams organize around value and create high performing teams

Conducting Discovery to understand the hierarchy and existing Flow, communication channels, and culture

A general observation of many organizations is that intentional design and architecture for teams and organizational structure do not exist. This premise is observable in many organizations’ hierarchies, which look exactly like each other. Melvin Conway observed the pattern of the organization’s solutions following the pattern of its communications structures – known as Conway’s Law. Even organizations across disparate sectors and industries structurally look very much the same. The pattern repeats itself as the most common way to deliver goods and services. 

But what if your organization is unique? Should it intentionally design a repeatable pattern for both systems (people and products) to thrive in concert?

The discovery activities involve detailed exploration through knowledge and information gathering, empathy interviews, surveys, analysis, and communication. The following are the types of things that you and your co-facilitators and coaches will need to know and gather to conduct the workshops effectively. You may need other context-dependent items, so the list needs to be completed to satisfy your context. The result is an organizational design hypothesis, a Team Design Strategy.

  • Organization Chart
  •  Key organization, portfolio, teams, or team problems and opportunities. The “Why?” for change.
  •  Staff skills matrix
  •  List of staff, contractor, and supplier/vendor people and
  •  List of critical tools, platforms, infrastructure, architecture, system, et cetera resources
  • Significant contracts for vendors/suppliers that the system is dependent upon in the scope of the discovery and design activities
    •  Performance metrics for the system(s) involved in the scope of discovery and design activities, including related upstream and downstream systems 
    • We are not interested in individual performance metrics.
    •  For publicly traded companies, high-level market trade, share, and valuation data
    •  Market data, shares, segments, targets, product positioning, customers, personas, et cetera – see Agile Product Management & Delivery
  •  Outcomes of any Business Agility Health Assessments
  •  Enterprise/corporate strategy, portfolio, service-line strategy documents
  •  Existing value stream mapping artifacts
  •  Existing process mapping artifacts
  •  Existing Quality Management System artifacts
  •  People Management (HR) policies & Labor/Union Rights agreements and policies
  •  Solution and Product Roadmaps
  •  Active and future planned Marketing campaigns
  •  List of the top innovations in the system from the past five years
  •  List of the top successful solution/product/delivery/investment endeavors from the past five years
  •  List of the top failures of the system from the past five years

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Defining the value stream network scope and objectives

Earlier, we discussed the need for creating a compelling goal and objectives and expressing the objectives in OKR format with key results. Defining the scope of the TDS is a process of understanding value, defining your products and services, and then identifying the value streams. The inputs from VSIW and value stream mapping will be invaluable as the group can scope the boundaries of the network and target design areas visually using the maps.

Figure 1. Driving the design through divergence and convergence to a testable hypothesis with Design Thinking

Objectives

The goals for the digital transformation, and perhaps some OKRs could be carried forward from earlier workshops or effort. At a minimum, the group should document OKRs to provide clarity on “what success looks like” for the workshop, Team Design Strategy outputs & outcomes. OKRs that capture progress towards larger organizational change and design goals should also accompany the workshop planning and preparations.

Identifying Value Streams for the Products and making value flow without interruptions

The SAFe Implementation Roadmap includes the Value Stream and ART Identification Workshop. This workshop occurs before, during, and after you develop your Team Design Strategy. The outcome of the VSIW will influence the decisions that you will make about your TDS, and vice versa. As design assumptions are validated (or not), you may need to revisit identification. This is managed through feedback loops and markers that the group will create and checkin on in subsequent PI’s.

The type, size, complexity, and number of value streams you identify will inform the TDS. In contexts where you can address change systemically across the enterprise, you must ask important questions about business agility.

  • Did you identify a business agility value stream (BAVS)[a value stream for an entire business or enterprise; not just a SAFe BAVS]?
  • Were all of the BUs able to participate in identifying, analyzing, and creating the BAVS flow?
  • Did the BAVS leaders include all of the key enterprise stakeholders? HR? Finance? Sales? Engineering?
  • What are the operational and development value streams in the context of the BAVS?
  • Does the BAVS hypothesis support the enterprise goals, and is the strategy viable?
  • Was the BAVS hypothesis and process communicated to the organization?
  • Did the team conduct dependency mapping to determine the full scope of the value stream?
  • For large-scale context, has a systems model for business agility been created to visualize the relationship between the enterprise, portfolio/service line, networked teams, and suppliers?

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Identifying the skills and expertise needed to achieve the goals

A team with missing skills or low capacity for skills will not be able to achieve high performance. They will struggle to enable flow because of the constant pull of matrixed resources and people. Conduct a skills gap analysis to determine if the system has all of the necessary expertise and skills to foster an environment where thinking, decision-making, and high-performance production can occur en masse.

The enterprise must also hypothesize about the available capacity in the system. Are your BU’s perennially late to the market with non-competitive products? Are your customers consistently giving unmolested feedback that your teams need to be able to deliver on time consistently? These are signs the system is not flowing and may be starved of the right skills and capacity mix. There is a balance to be achieved across cross-functional agile teams of teams networked with shared services functional teams. The key is to break the matrix and create long-lived teams while reducing specialization that is unnecessary or is an economically unsustainable bottleneck to flow.

Recruiting and selecting team members with the right skills and experience

Organizational leaders know how to recruit qualified team members. Developing a team design strategy with intentional architecture presents an opportunity for the leaders to correct deficiencies in the system design with the intent to enable flow. This also presents an opportunity for leaders to lead by example and display a growth mindset by offering to re-skill and re-train people rather than conducting another reduction in force or layoff. It could also lead to unexpected or counterintuitive trade-off decisions that require strong leadership to stand behind the decision-making. We are proposing different ways of working!

Artifacts used:

  • Organizational roles and skill books
  • Capability statements
  • SAFe Role Responsibility Wheels

Using Design Thinking to Understand Flow Problems, Opportunities

Figure 2: Design Thinking – Scaled Agile, Inc.

It is good practice to use design thinking to help teams and stakeholders understand the problem space and opportunities in the solution space. How (strategy) you will organize your teams around value is both a problem to solve and an opportunity.

A Design Thinking, divergence, and convergence paradigm should be facilitated early in the team design strategy workshop. This will help everyone involved understand the full scope and nature of the problem and solution spaces. The paradigm is also a great place from which you can derive your hypotheses for the value stream networked team designs. It is important to facilitate the design thinking process for team design strategy through the divergence and convergence patterns.

Figure 3: Team Design Strategy Lean Canvas – Agile Rising template

Artifacts used:

  • Team Design Strategy Lean Canvas (Agile Rising)
  • Design Thinking Template
  • The Team Design Strategy Template (Agile Rising)

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Establishing clear roles and responsibilities for each team member

Leaders in the organization must provide and support the pillars of clarity and competence, and create the environment for thinking (Intent Based Leadership, D. Marquet). This is of extreme importance when it comes to bridging the transition and gap from old ways role and job descriptions to new ways role and job descriptions. Engage with your SAFe Lean-Agile Center of Excellence and competent SAFe Practice Consultants to create customized role based transition training for your organizational leaders and managers. Create and build a vision for growth mindset, intent based leadership, and Leading the Digital Age. Involve your human resources team as early as possible.

Figure 4: SAFe role responsibility wheels

The SAFe 6.0 provides deeper insights and clarity on roles within the framework. Additionally, if your complexity requires additional lean-agile/SAFe related roles, like ‘release management,’ be sure to document the role, interaction modes, and responsibilities clearly.

Artifacts used:

  • Team Canvas
  • ART Canvas

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Creating a communication and decision-making framework that supports effective collaboration

The Team Design Strategy Lean Canvas (start with the lean canvas when facilitating) will be a great source of information from which the group will construct a communication and decision-making framework for both a successful team design strategy and team formation & self-selection workshops.

The communication plan is constructed using traditional means and forms. It must include logistics planning for the workshop sessions/event, who is responsible for performing which communications, frequency of communications, form of communication, and an action plan to track progress towards goals.

A lightweight decision making framework is created to accommodate the critical and inevitable sacred cows, territorial, matrix-change, and “in-flight” projects, people, plans, and resources that will be affected by the team design and formation activities forthcoming. We suggest listing current manager, business owner roles and responsibilities, and explicitly walk through with the group how team design and team formation decisions will be decentralized during the workshops. The goal of team design strategy and team formation & self-selection workshops involves an invitation and pull based mode of selection. We are specifically and intentionally avoiding traditional assignment modes of many old way systems and ways.

The decision making framework should document how individuals will choose their teams. How team invitations will work. Which roles in the design are reserved for centralized decision making (e.g. management retains privilege of choosing and assigning Product Managers, Product Owners). The remaining roles are open for team members to self-select within the boundaries of the ARTs purpose and the acceptance criteria for a team design and formation.

Creating Acceptance Criteria and Definition of Done for Team Designs and Formations

The design group participating in this workshop should create acceptance criteria for all types and topologies of team designs and formations within the scope of the value stream network.

Additionally, a system-wide definition of done should be created for the designs and formations including both functional and non-functional requirements.

Both of these artifacts will be published transparently as part of the communication plan.

Artifacts used:

  • Communication Plan
  • Team Design Strategy Lean Canvas (Agile Rising)
  • Design Thinking Template
  • The Team Design Strategy Template (Agile Rising)

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Providing resources and support to help the team achieve its goals

Design thinking and formation processes often uncover issues related to architecture, design, people, or resources. As a leader, you are responsible for facilitating change in the system to accommodate new designs. Whether it’s as simple as investing in a CI/CD pipeline and test automation or as complex as creating new roles and transforming HR policies, it is necessary to ensure that your organization is intentionally designed.

Most organizations are not deliberately designed, and therefore, lack intelligence in their design. They are often bundled together haphazardly due to necessity and sheer will. However, it is crucial to remember that your people are your most important asset. You wouldn’t put your products or services out in the marketplace with haphazard designs and architectures, so why do it with your teams?

Investing in an intentionally designed organization will ensure that your team is set up for success. We observe that most organizations are not intentionally designed. Most are haphazardly bundled together through startup to large-size growth by necessity and sheer will. 

Do you put your products and services in the marketplace with haphazard design and ad hoc architectures? So why do it with your most important asset, your people? Leaders must be prepared to add, change, or delete parts of the existing system to accommodate the new design. This could be as simple and easy as investing in a CI/CD pipeline and test automation or as complex and time-consuming as creating new job roles, hiring people, and HR transformation.

Monitoring progress and making adjustments as needed (mostly AI written)

Monitoring progress and making adjustments as needed is an essential part of achieving success in your digital transformation. It involves continuously evaluating the performance of your team designs and formations, including the systems in place to ensure that they are meeting the desired goals and objectives. By monitoring progress, you can quickly identify any obstacles or issues that may arise and make the necessary changes to keep your ART on track. It also allows you to celebrate successes and acknowledge areas where improvements have been made. Making adjustments as needed ensures that your organization remains agile and responsive to changing business context, enabling it to adapt and thrive in an ever-changing business landscape.

Outputs & Outcomes

We have documented a strategy for our Team’s design and future formation and created OKRs to help us realize our effective strategy and achieve organizational goals.

  • Documented strategy (in story form, relevant models, diagrams, flow, etc)
  • Documented Definition of Done for Team Designs and Formations
  • Documented Acceptance Criteria for Team Designs and Formations
  • Model or diagram of proposed teams including type, number of, topology, purpose
  • OKRs that will become relevant for determining progress towards the organization design goals related to the value stream network teams designs

We have formed an organizational design hypothesis for the Development Value Stream and Agile Release Trains (ARTs), shared services, suppliers, and systems teams that are part of the value stream network.

  • Documented organizational design hypothesis for the DVS and ARTs, shared services, suppliers, and systems teams that are part of the value stream network.
  • Created a feedback loop, marker and plan to test and validate the hypothesis over future planning intervals (PIs). This includes a checkin plan for OKRs.

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what’s next?

In the next article we are going to deep dive into the Team Formation & Self-Selection Workshop plan including what activities and artifacts you will need to be successful.

References

  1. Design Thinking graphic, 2024; Scaled Agile, Inc. – https://scaledagileframework.com/design-thinking/
  2. Implementation Roadmap, 2024; Scaled Agile, Inc. – https://scaledagileframework.com/implementation-roadmap/
  3. Intent Based Leadership, 2024; D. Marquet – https://intentbasedleadership.com/how-to-empower-people/
  4. Leading in the Digital Age, 2024; Scaled Agile, Inc. – https://scaledagileframework.com/leading-in-the-digital-age/

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