To maintain agility at scale, software teams can use technological and organizational solutions to reduce dependencies and work autonomously. According to Fabrice Bernhard, collaboration technology can be leveraged to create a distributed network of teams. To empower their teams, leaders can support them with a systematic problem-solving culture aimed at delivering good products to customers.
Fabrice Bernhard spoke about tech-enabled networks of teams at FlowCon France.
Bernhard defined a tech-enabled network of teams as an organization in which work is distributed across software teams, giving them a high-level of autonomy and empowerment, and then merging back together thanks to technologies that enable distributed collaboration.
In an organization of n individuals, there are n(n-1)/2 possible direct interactions. The number of possible interactions grows much faster than the number of individuals, which means that "individuals and interactions" is a principle that does not scale, Bernhard said.
When an organization grows and the number of dependencies between teams grows, people usually try to address those dependencies with more communication. Bernhard suggested using a different approach for scaling individuals and interaction in empowered teams:
Jeff Bezos’ counter-intuitive reaction was the opposite: reduce the need for communication to scale. That requires ingenious technological and organizational solutions to reduce the dependencies between teams.
Before mentioning technology, teams are about people, Bernhard said. Supporting teams in a large organization requires investing in good team leaders:
What we have learned over the years is that good team leaders are competent, caring and spiky. By spiky we use the definition from the excellent management book Nine Lies About Work: "Spiky people have honed one or two distinct abilities that they use to make their mark on the world".
Bernhard mentioned that competence, care, and spikiness allow leaders to support and inspire their team. To support their teams in a systematic way, it’s essential to create a systematic problem-solving culture: making it ok to talk about problems, putting indicators in place to detect problems early and often and training everyone on how to analyse and solve those problems.
An example of using technology to enable team autonomy on large projects, is the adoption of DevOps best practices, to ensure teams can continue to deliver value to customers without being slowed down by too many dependencies, Bernhard said. The key ingredients are the service architecture, a collaboration platform such as GitHub, automated testing and automated deployment. With these technologies, dependencies between teams can be reduced to (re-)enable continuous deployment at scale.
Bernhard mentioned the benefits that they have seen in their teams, which go back to the purpose of agile or lean thinking: delivering good products to customers by operating in an environment that provides meaningful work to people. Giving teams the means to do great work and delivering value is good for personal growth and good for business, he added. The lean culture has enabled faster progression of people in the teams and also helped to come up with more ingenious solutions to solve clients’ problems, he concluded.