Organizational Structure to Support Agile Teams

1. agilebydesign.com
@agile_bydesign
Support Structure
For Agile Teams
by
Agile By Design Inc.
is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-
ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
.

2. agilebydesign.com
@agile_bydesign
Support team often have to support a conflicting diverse set of stakeholders
Support Teams
Architects
Agile Team
LOB
Agile Team
LOB
LOB
Agile Team
LOB
Best Practices
Consulting
Stewardship
Enablement
Build & Run
Support
Service Privacy
UX
HR
DBAs
Creative
Impediments
• Stuck in order taker mode
• Agile team siloing
• Credibility to provide advice
Supporting Agile teams means…
• Promoting customer centric thinking
• Enabling upstream to teams to self organize
• Provide alignment without introducing
bottlenecks
• Increase quality across teams
• Scale capability

3. agilebydesign.com
@agile_bydesign
The starting point of any Agile System, is the Value Center where the majority of
knowledge workers are organized into teams that can deliver on customer / market
outcomes
• Dedicated, cross functional and hopefully co-located
• perform activities necessary to create market value
• Work enters and is completed without minimal external dependencies.
• The team is able to self-organize within a set of defined constraints
When ever we can, move supporting services up into the agile team!
Examples
• Online Payments Team
• Digital Credit Tracker Team
• Retail Banking Product Team
However, effective agile team require support to be effective in a larger enterprise
• How can we enable alignment without resorting to command and control?
• How can we promote coordination without introducing bureaucracy or bottlenecks?
• What are the organizational structures supports that can be used to support agile teams?

4. agilebydesign.com
@agile_bydesign
There are four common Service Delivery Patterns that are useful when defining how
support teams can provide value to upstream teams and stakeholders
Service Center - Receive
work and send it back
Traveler Pool – Work onsite
with the upstream team for
a short period of time
Community of Practice
Facilitate knowledge sharing
and common outcomes
Guardians / Enablers Educate and
coach business departments on
common platforms and processes
1 2
3 4
Choose the right Service delivery pattern based on
• Level of organizational alignment to get value from the service
• Level of training required to provide the service
• How frequently a specific client required the service
• Client sophistication / capability / mindset
• Scale of the service
• Feedback upstream required to support the service
• Collaboration required by support team to provide
the service

5. agilebydesign.com
@agile_bydesign
Most of today’s Support Services are provided through the Shared Service Center
pattern
Support Team
Upstream teams – make request
to the support team for goods or
services that are well defined and
repetitive
1 2
Support team – services the request, gathering
any additional requirements from the upstream
team required to deliver on the request
3
Support team – works as a team to
build the requested deliverable,
typically with only moderate
feedback from the upstream team.
Upstream teams – receive the completed good / service,
commenting on any errors / changes that require further
fixing
4

6. agilebydesign.com
@agile_bydesign
Most of today’s Support Services are provided through the Shared Service Center
pattern
• Upstream has little capability to perform the service
• Upstream has no desire / permission to be able to
perform the service
• Service is repetitive / commoditized
• Service requires highly specialized capability
• Service does not require a lot of feedback from the
upstream team
• Support team needs to collaborate to perform the
service
Outcomes
• Increased centralized
control
• Least amount of feedback
• Services that do not scale
well
• Poorer organizational agility
Applicability
Advice
• Group service requests from multiple upstream teams onto a
common backlog, and defining replenishment mechanisms
for the service
• Use Kanban to measure, manage and improve the flow of
service delivery
• Start throttling down the WIP / throughput allocated to the
service to make room for other more collaborative service
types!
Services supported through this pattern often represent a
class of service that we want to push upstream using another
pattern!
Shared Service
Center
Examples
• Legacy Infrastructure
• Call Center
• Marketing Deployment

7. agilebydesign.com
@agile_bydesign
Providing supporting services through a Traveler Pool allows scarce capability to
deployed in a way that does not interfere with agility and feedback
Support Team
Upstream teams – make request to
the support team for a specialist to
assist in the creation of value
1 2
Support team – responds by providing
someone available from a pool of specialists
to service the request
Support team – the available specialist
joins the upstream team for the duration
required to complete the request
3

8. agilebydesign.com
@agile_bydesign
• Upstream has little / no capability to perform the
service
• Upstream may have some desire / permission to be
able to perform the service
• Service requires highly specialized capability
• Service requires close collaboration with the
upstream team
• Service has insufficient / fluctuating demand from
any one particular upstream team
Outcomes
• Flexible allocation of scarce
capability
• High degree of collaboration
• Management overhead to
manage pools
• Better scaling
• Better organizational agility
Applicability
Advice
• Group service requests from multiple upstream teams onto a
common backlog, and defining replenishment mechanisms
for the service
• Reserving some support team WIP/ capacity to work on
internal service capability improvement
• Use the highly collaborative nature of traveler pooling to
prime upstream teams for a more self serve / enablement
model
Services supported through this pattern can be candidates to
be supported in a more self service model
Examples
• Legacy / Integration
Developers
• UX / UI
• NFR Testing
Traveler Pool
Providing supporting services through a Traveler Pool allows scarce capability to
deployed in a way that does not interfere with agility and feedback

9. agilebydesign.com
@agile_bydesign
Enablement Team
Providing supporting services through an Enablement Team maximizes an
Organizations ability to scale out capabilities of enterprise concern in a way that
promotes both alignment and agility
Support teams – organize some of their members
into enablement teams, specialists responsible for
enabling specific outcomes and capability in the
wider organization
1
2 enablement members determine how to
allocate oversight, advice, and guidance to
different areas of the organization
3 Enablers teaches, pairs, and coaches different teams /
stakeholders how to adopt new capability through a
common platform

10. agilebydesign.com
@agile_bydesign
• Upstream should be performing the service
• Upstream requires governance and support to ensure they
can be effective and address enterprise concerns
• Service increases in value when leveraging a common platform
• Service represents a capability that needs to embedded
across the organization
• Services are mature enough to be provided as a platform
using a self serve model
• Services are not directly on the value stream
Outcomes
• Oversight / guidance that
enables and empowers
• Enterprise capabilities are
pushed upstream
• New capabilities scale out to
the organization
• Dramatic increase in agility
Applicability
Advice
• Refactor various governance driven gate and checkpoints to
leveraging the Enablement model
• Revisit various services provided through travelling as
potential candidates for an enablement approach
• Reserve capacity in the support team to create the
knowledge assets and tech platforms required for enabling
teams to self serve the service provided by the enablement
team
Moving service capabilities to market focused teams
increases feedback, self organization and organizational
agility!
Examples
• DevOps
• Agile Coaches
• HR
• Architecture
Providing supporting services through an Enablement Team maximizes an
Organizations ability to scale out capabilities of enterprise concern in a way that
promotes both alignment and agility