The document discusses plans to reorganize the company structure to better support rapid growth and an agile mindset. It proposes organizing into cross-functional teams focused on execution, technology operations, QA, and technology. These teams would be self-organizing and work based on a backlog prioritized by product owners. The new structure aims to blend agile and holacracy principles by distributing authority across roles like chief wrangler, chief cop, and chief firefighter rather than having a traditional management hierarchy.

1. It’s an Agile world and we just live in it
Prepared by: David Meyer
October 5, 2015

2.  Several years of success
 On cusp ramping up to support new contract
 Several new opportunities in pipeline
 Need to be positioned to support the rapid
increase in demand and people

3.  Organization as flat as possible
 Maintain agile mindset
 Agile does not mean faster
 Agile is the ability to quickly adjust to changing
business needs to deliver business value
 Technology a vehicle to deliver value
 Focus on client satisfaction

4.  Focus on roles, not hierarchy
 Organize to support the work
 Business Technology, not IT
 Create framework for environment
 Blending of Agile and Holocracy
 Four general areas of focus
 Execution
 Tech Ops
 QA
 Tech

5.  Development Teams
 Self organizing
 All roles to support development on team
 Scrum Master
 Technical lead
 Responsible for executing against defined backlog
 Team works with others
 Product Owners
 Responsible to define priority
 Approve user stories
 Subject matter experts as needed

6.  Key roles
 Product Owners
 Responsible for product roadmap and prioritization of
effort
 Chief Wrangler
 Keeps the herd going in the same direction
 Chief Cop
 Rollouts and quality
 Chief Firefighter
 Production support
 Chief Geek
 Technology guru; architecture, data management, vendor
mgt, software licensing

7.  Tools and processes
 Virtual scrum boards
 Test Management
 Measure velocity
 Managed backlog
 Capacity Matrix
 visual board that lists all line functions providing capacity on one axis
and projects/assignments/other work withdrawing capacity on the
other
 Tetris board
 consists of a number of swim lanes - one per team - divided by time
markers in the form of sprint boundaries. Here, teams illustrate
through the use of colored sticky notes of different shapes which
release or epic they will be working on in a particular sprint, and
dependencies between teams are illustrated by allowing the colored
notes to "overflow" swimlanes, occasionally resembling “Tetris”
blocks

8.  Daily touchpoint
 Area of focus
 Where help is needed
 Identify issues, not intended to solve them

9. Additional food for thought and examples

10.  Execution – Development teams with focus on
client on-boarding, conversion of existing
programs to new technology. Team also is
responsible to entire project lifecycle, requirements
to implementation.
 Technical Operations – Development teams with
focus on supporting client programs; support
begins once initial go-live support ends; project
coordinator to support reporting, time
recording/reporting, managing priorities,
requirements capture. This is a team to grow
developers (mentored by a Lead Developer) and
project managers (mentored by sr pm from
Execution team).

11.  Technology – Team with focus on
organizational technology roadmap,
everything from infrastructure to development
environment. Part of this includes creating
strategy to convert existing programs to new
platforms. This team also manages the
infrastructure and software licensing, vendor
selection, etc.
 QA - focus on mitigating introduction of
defects to our system by development activities

14.  Holacracy is a social technology or system of
organizational governance in which authority
and decision-making are distributed
throughout a holarchy of self-organizing teams
rather than being vested in a management
hierarchy