Troy DuMoulin discusses enabling flexible and skilled cross-functional teams within agile and DevOps organizations. He covers early organizational design theories, defining teams versus groups, benefits of cross-functional and self-managing teams, agile scrum teams, the DevOps team approach, and tips for leading self-organizing teams. Vincent Geffray then discusses how cross-functional response teams can help support faster release cycles through faster response cycles, outlining challenges and benefits of automation.

1. v
Enabling Flexible & Skilled Cross-Functional
Teams within Agile & DevOps Organizations
Troy DuMoulin, Pink Elephant | Tuesday, October 17, 2017

2. Introductions
• Troy DuMoulin
• VP, Research and Development
• Pink Elephant
• @TroyDuMoulin
• Vincent Geffray
• Sr Director, Marketing
• Everbridge
• @VGeffray

3. Pink Elephant – Knowledge Translated Into Results
Enabling Flexible & Skilled Cross-
Functional Teams within Agile &
DevOps Organizations

4. Enabling Flexible & Skilled Cross-Functional Teams © Pink Elephant, 2017. All Rights Reserved.
Welcome & Agenda
§ Early Organizational Design
§ Teams vs Groups
§ Cross Functional Teams
§ Self Managing Teams
§ DevOps Structures
§ Leading For Collaboration
4
Objective
Understanding how to encourage
engagement, collaboration and innovation
through team structure and leadership

5. Enabling Flexible & Skilled Cross-Functional Teams © Pink Elephant, 2017. All Rights Reserved.
Early Organizational Design & Task Specialization
§ Adam Smith (1723-1790)
Pioneer in Organizational Design (Industrial Revolution)
- Wealth of Nations (1776)
Fragmentation of processes into simple tasks
§ Frederick W. Taylor (1856-1915)
Founder of “Scientific Management”
…the study of relationships between people and tasks for the purpose of redesigning
the work process to increase efficiency (1911)
5

6. Enabling Flexible & Skilled Cross-Functional Teams © Pink Elephant, 2017. All Rights Reserved.
What Is A Team?
“A Team is a small number of
people with complementary skills
who are committed to a common
purpose, set of performance
goals, and approach for which
they hold themselves mutually
accountable.”
6
Source: Katzenbach and Smith

7. Enabling Flexible & Skilled Cross-Functional Teams © Pink Elephant, 2017. All Rights Reserved.
Ignore &
Deny
It s Not
My Job
Finger
Pointing
Cover Your
Tail
Wait &
See
Confusion
Pretense
I Did Not
Know
See it
Own it
Solve it
Do it
BehavioralChange
PersonalAccountability
Productivity
Rogers Connors / Tom Smith / Graig HickmanVictim Mentality
Establishing Personal Accountability
7

8. Enabling Flexible & Skilled Cross-Functional Teams © Pink Elephant, 2017. All Rights Reserved.
Leadership & Team Authority
TYPE OF TEAMS AUTHORITY
Manager-Led Authority only for performing the work
Self-Managing &
(Self-Organizing)
Also has authority over how work is done (the team’s
process)
Self-Designing
Also has authority over who is on the team and sometimes
over reporting relationships
Self-Governing Also has the authority to alter a team’s main purpose
8
Richard Hackman, Harvard University

9. Enabling Flexible & Skilled Cross-Functional Teams © Pink Elephant, 2017. All Rights Reserved.
Cross Functional Teams:
Getting The Right People On The Bus
Include all
needed
disciplines
Balance
technical skill
levels
Balance
domain
knowledge
Seek
diversity
Consider
persistence
7

10. Enabling Flexible & Skilled Cross-Functional Teams © Pink Elephant, 2017. All Rights Reserved.
Self Organization:
Containers, Differences & Exchanges
Source: Glenda Eoyang - Containers, Significant Differences, and Transforming Exchanges (2001)
Container:
A boundary
within which
self-
organization
occurs.
Exchanges: An interaction between members in which one
or more individual is changed or influenced.
Differences:
Types and
degrees of
difference
influence how
a team self-
organizes.
9

11. Enabling Flexible & Skilled Cross-Functional Teams © Pink Elephant, 2017. All Rights Reserved.
Agile Scrum Teams
11
Scrum Team
Scrum Master
Development TeamCustomers/Users
Product Owner
Internal Stakeholders

12. Enabling Flexible & Skilled Cross-Functional Teams © Pink Elephant, 2017. All Rights Reserved.
DevOps Team Approach
13
Lean + Agile + Culture + Automation

13. Enabling Flexible & Skilled Cross-Functional Teams © Pink Elephant, 2017. All Rights Reserved.
DevOps = T not I Shaped Specialists
13
Generalist Pure
Specialist
Practical
Specialist
Both the extremes of Generalist and Pure Specialist
create challenges with teaming & collaboration. DevOps
teams need T Shaped Practical Specialists

14. Enabling Flexible & Skilled Cross-Functional Teams © Pink Elephant, 2017. All Rights Reserved.
Leading Self Organizing Teams
§ A cross-functional team’s job is to self-organize around the challenges, and
within the boundaries and constraints, put in place by management
§ Management’s job is to come up with appropriate challenges and remove
impediments to self-organization
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§ However, if leaders overly constrain how a
team solves the challenge given to it, self-
organization will not occur
§ The team will shut down; because it has already
been told so much about the challenge and how
to solve it, it will wait to hear the rest.

15. Enabling Flexible & Skilled Cross-Functional Teams © Pink Elephant, 2017. All Rights Reserved.
Creating The Environment
§ First, you must create a place where people are willing to do the hard work
of innovation with its inherent paradoxes and stresses.
15
Purpose
Why We Exist
A Sense Of
Community
Shared Values
What We Agree
Is Important
Rules of
Engagement
How We Interact with
Each Other

16. Enabling Flexible & Skilled Cross-Functional Teams © Pink Elephant, 2017. All Rights Reserved.
Benefits Of Self Managing Teams
Create a stronger sense of commitment to the work effort among members
Improve quality, speed, and innovation.
Have more satisfied employees and lower turnover and absenteeism
Facilitate faster new product development
Allow cross trained team members greater flexibility in dealing with personnel shortages
due to illness or turnover
Keep operational cost down because of reduction in managerial levels and increased
efficiencies.
19

17. Agile Teams For Agile Models - (Cross Functional Teams) © Pink Elephant, 2017. All Rights Reserved.
Questions & Thank You
Troy DuMoulin
t.dumoulin@pinkelephant.com
blogs.pinkelephant.com/troy
@TroyDuMoulin

18. v
Cross-functional Response Team: Faster Release
Cycles Require Faster Response Cycles
Vincent Geffray, Everbridge | Tuesday, October 17, 2017

19. Why are we doing all this, again?
Your Customers Demand
SPEED

20. Critical events always happen in the IT world
Outages • Slow Performance • Application Function Failure • Security Breaches…

21. Critical events always happen in the IT world
Outages • Slow Performance • Application Function Failure • Security Breaches…

22. MTTR
Critical events always happen in the IT world
Outages • Slow Performance • Application Function Failure • Security Breaches…

23. MTTR
Critical events always happen in the IT world
Outages • Slow Performance • Application Function Failure • Security Breaches…
Now What?

24. Response Management: Ecosystem and Mindset
• Feel the pain
• Frustrated
• Impatient
• Under high tempo, high pressure
• Disrupted, distracted
• FrustratedService Desk
• Anxious about business impact
• Anticipate business response
Self Managing Response Team

25. 6 Challenges of the “Self Managing Response Team(s)”
1. Assess the issue (P0, P1, High, Major, Sev1…)
2. Locate the right “resolvers”
3. Assemble/engage the response team (how?)
4. Collaborate and coordinate the efforts (tools?)
5. Keep stakeholders and impacted business users updated
6. Post-mortem and continuous improvement

26. Multi-Modal
CommunicationsSmart RoutingSmart Assessor
Smart Channel
Smart Analytics
Audit trail
Recording
Post-mortem
Team Performance Report
Closed-Loop IT Response Automation for Faster Service Restoration
Proactive communication
to impacted users
Regular updates to senior mgt
Conference Bridge
ITSM
Email
API
Manual
On-call scheduling
Automated escalation

27. A Few Proven Benefits of Response Automation
- Only absolutely required people are engaged
- Remove inefficient hand offs (Lean IT principles)
- No in-person confrontation à automated reach and escalation
- Make it easy for on-call people to engage (1 click collaboration)
- Lower volumes of inbound calls à proactively notify impacted users
- Keep key stakeholders updated
- Teams keep focusing on delivery à Reduce IT unplanned work
- Post mortem /Fact-based conversation
- Insights for continuous improvement

28. ITalerting.com
IT Operational Response Management
Automate Communication, Collaboration, and Orchestration
for Faster Service Restoration and Delivery
itelligent notifications • rules-based escalation • 1-click conferencing • on-call scheduling • collaboration • auditing & reporting