Team of Teams Timeline in Weeks
The Team of Teams holon’s success depends on the health of the Teams that comprise it, and the strength of the relationships between them. Teams conduct their own ceremonies and participate in the ceremonies of the Team of Teams holon, along with their peers. With proper communication, representation and information sharing Teams of Teams are able to rapidly create value in a much broader scale with minimal loss due to overhead. Without it, key risks due to handoffs, waiting for dependencies, rework due to integration of incompatible designs, siloed knowledge and missed opportunities for reuse, co-design and learning can substantially diminish the capacity of the Team of Teams.
- Values & Goals
- Understand my team's role
- Accountability to my team
- Self governing team
- Self organizing team
- Purpose
- Agile mindset
- Willing to learn & grow
- Product & Impact
- Prioritized healthy backlog
- Working software with quality
- Necessary tools to do the job
- Good metric tracking (KPIs)
- ToT working agreement
- Predictable delivery
- Product feedback loops
- Marketing plans
- Training courses
- Leadership & Culture
- ToT morale
- Cross-Team camaraderie
- Shared vision/goals
- ToT values
- Understand function of other teams
- External perception
- Trust, transparency
- Cross-Team feedback
- Servant leadership culture
- Conscious Leadership culture
- Continuous improvement culture
- Cross-Team collaboration
- Team member rotation
- Development of future leaders
- Markets & Environment
- Effective Agile process
- Effective architecture
- Collaboration space
- Collaboration tools
- Predictable cadence
- Automation where appropriate
- Effective Business processes
- Sales pipeline
- Sufficient funding & sponsorship
- Upstream dependencies support success
- Specialized services support
- Share best practices
- Cross training
Quarterly Envisioning
This session defines the vision and objectives for the next quarter. It shifts the focus from OUTPUT to OUTCOMES. We know that there will always be more ideas than capacity to execute, and therefore there is always too much on the plate. Shifting the definition of success from “we delivered x amount of features to the market,” to “we made x impact on the world” allows the Team of Teams to look critically at the feature list and focus on those that will best advance the strategic objectives, and leave the rest as stretch goals.
The highest impact objectives are then aligned with those of other ToTs, as well as the annual objectives from Annual Lean Portfolio Management.
- Values & Goals
- Vision for the quarter
- Aligned to purpose
- Innovation mindset
- Willing to take risks
- Continuous improvement
- Product & Impact
- Quarterly OKRs
- Define Features
- Prioritization
- Metrics
- Feedback loops
- Update roadmaps
- Leadership & Culture
- Maintain or improve ToT culture
- Leader development
- Feedback from employees
- Open channels of communication
- Top to bottom alignment of purpose/vision
- Markets & Environment
- Capacity plan
- Explore flow improvements
- Sequencing of Team execution
- Hiring/talent acquisition
- Systems/equipment/real estate procurement/dissolution
- Promotions
- Understand market conditions
ToT Backlog Refinement (once a sprint, follow on to team refinement)
The Team of Teams Backlog Refinement session is led by the Chief Product Owner and attended by the Product Owners of all involved teams as well as any necessary SMEs. This should be held on the same day as the Team Backlog Refinement to properly align strategic and tactical decision making. The Product owner who facilitates the Team Backlog Refinement is a participant in the ToT backlog refinement and brings the full context of the team-level decisions to the ToT process. This key interconnection is critical to maintaining alignment between portfolio and team objectives.
- Values & Goals
- Vision for the Team
- Empowered team
- Committed team
- Properly skilled and resourced
- Product & Impact
- Write down features
- Make Features/Epics READY
- Prioritization
- Engaged Chief Product Owner
- Split into shell stories
- Planning horizon
- Acceptance/Success criteria
- Leadership & Culture
- Shared vision
- Cross-team collaboration
- Help other teams
- Product & tech perspectives
- Markets & Environment
- Feature level DoR
- Architectural/Systemic needs
- Dependency mitigation
Team of Teams Quarterly Planning
This session best resembles what Scrum calls Release Planning, or what SAFe calls PI Planning. Our recommendation is to come up with a high level execution plan with key dependencies, risks, and milestones clearly defined. It is not necessary to thoroughly plan more than the first 1-2 sprints as the later sprints will be best informed by the results of the first ones, allowing the teams to Respond to change vs follow a plan.
Business context, design, and architectural needs should be well understood by all teams, and used to inform the high level plan with the best available current knowledge.
- Values & Goals
- Team goals
- Cross functional
- Self organizing
- Self governing
- Supportive of other teams
- Proactive & creative culture
- Responsible
- Product & Impact
- ToT Working agreement
- Tooling that supports scale
- Scaled plan - optimize for flow
- Risk board
- User flows
- Architectural flows
- OKRs finalized and shared
- Roadmap
- Leadership & Culture
- Shared Scaled Goal
- External team collaboration
- Effective communication
- Commitment to scaled plan intent
- ToT Values
- Retrospect on planning
- Markets & Environment
- Capacity planning
- Resources are available
- Dependency mapping & mitigation
- Environments ready
Scrum of Scrums (twice a Sprint or as needed)
The Scrum of Scrums brings together the Scrum Masters from each of the teams in the ToT to collectively navigate the ever changing environment while collaborating on shared product goals. The primary objectives are
- Surfacing impediments and opportunities
- Working together to support/enable each other
- Escalating intractable issues to leadership.
The SoS will also often include representation from product or tech SMEs based on interest and need.
- Values & Goals
- Team morale
- Team purpose
- How is the team doing?
- Solution mindset
- Product & Impact
- Update other teams
- Update Agile tooling
- Release burn up chart
- Shift work to meet changing needs
- Surface impediments
- Leadership & Culture
- Teams collaborating with teams
- ToT shared purpose
- Provide updates
- Ask for help
- Markets & Environment
- Impediment reporting/removal
- Dependency tracking
- Capacity check in
ToT Demo/Review (once a month or as needed)
The objective of the Team of Teams review is to demonstrate completed, integrated functionality to your stakeholders, partners, and other teams. The ability to take a step back and see the product evolve incrementally builds a sense of group accomplishment while bringing new perspectives and ideas to the table. It is a critical opportunity to have an open conversation with your customers to get their feedback and better understand their needs.
- Values & Goals
- Demonstrate work by team
- Open to feedback
- Engaged & excited, pride in their work
- Product & Impact
- Demonstrate integrated functionality
- View of the emerging product
- Tracking towards business goals
- Leadership & Culture
- Customer/User feedback
- Team feedback (constructive)
- Course correction (Priority, Learning)
- Markets & Environment
- Value added to the system/product?
- Organizational/Systemic Learning
- Review delivery against plan
ToT Retrospective (once a month)
This session enables all collaborating teams to identify and respond to collective challenges and opportunities. The ToT retrospective is essential for building alignment across teams, establishing smooth working processes and building healthy relationships. We recommend holding both the team and ToT retrospectives on the same day, creating a half day dedicated to continuous improvement every month.
After the teams meet separately to gather their feedback, they gather in a larger session to identify common areas of improvement. Holding this offsite at a fun venue can be a great team building activity and help strengthen the bonds between teams.
- Values & Goals
- Team by team retro
- Team accountability
- Team learning
- Product & Impact
- Overall ToT retro
- Action Items to improve
- Measurement of action item impact
- Leadership & Culture
- What can we do differently at scale?
- Open and honest intent
- Teams share their experience
- Markets & Environment
- Team celebration choice/venue
ToT Systems Governance (once a sprint)
The actions taken in the Team of Teams holon in this session are identical to those in Portfolio Systems Governance, but on a smaller scale with narrower focus. This session is where the strategic and tactical meet. It enables teams to maintain architectural integrity while responding to the emergent needs of ongoing product development.
The key objective is to provide a means for the teams to balance short term (immediate delivery needs) and long term (adaptation of new technologies and capabilities) needs while maintaining or improving quality and maintainability.
- Values & Goals
- Alignment to Vision/Future Search
- Subject matter expertise
- Focus on simplicity
- Focus on value add
- Customer centricity
- Product & Impact
- Architectural runway
- Choice of technology
- Systems training
- Pilot new ideas (POC)
- Reporting (outcomes)
- Reporting (systems)
- Leadership & Culture
- Train & mentor
- Understand company culture
- Support team's success
- Continuous improvement
- Take and respond to feedback
- Markets & Environment
- Reference architectures (best practices)
- Avoid silos
- Establish guard rails
- Allow for flexibility in design (emergent)
- Focus on enabling flow
- Deploy system experts to instruct (coach)
- Central document repository
- Design follows needs
- Appropriate robustness & performance