You may not realize it but there are several agile team types that come into play even if you are not explicitly doing agile. Take a closer look below to explore the various team types and where they might be best applied for the greater good.
Size Matters regardless of agile team type
When aiming to be more agile one must consider the recommended structures that 20+ years of agility has arrived at. One important consideration is team size and fortunately there is a simple rule of thumb for that. The Two Pizza Rule states that a team should never be larger than the number of people it would take to eat 2 pizzas during a lunch meeting. Ideally that is no more than eight that is if everyone is good with 2 slices.
Beyond size though co-location is ideal where everyone on the team is in the same building or even better workspace. In the last few years, we have worked out some good practices for working remotely or hybrid with virtual teams. There are many advantages to working remotely, but nothing beats being in person for some things at least some of the time.
Beyond team size we have several different types of teams. Here are a few prevalent types that come to mind:
Cross-Functional Feature teams
By far the most prominent teams are those that produce new features. This team type tends to embrace Scrum and works in short sprint increments to deliver incremental value. Ideally you want these teams to fully operate as a self-organized, self-contained, and high-functioning group so the longer they stay together the better they get.
Being cross-functional is key with the suggestion being that each team is self-sufficient and can do everything that they need to do in order to build and deploy what they do.
Support or Shared Services teams
Along with the other agile team types, it is not unusual to have a number of special purpose support or shared services teams. that are needed to make the magic happen. Often these teams have specialized skills like design, documentation, deployments or ??? that go beyond the skillset of a typical cross-functional agile development team. As such these shared services teams are available to assist where needed but tend to be out of the loop and often perceived as a black hole dependency.
These teams tend to be overloaded and while they have their own initiatives in progress. These teams need to be tolerant of disruption and may need to shelve their work temporarily in order to help other teams or deal with emergencies. Because of this they tend to prefer Kanban style framework
Tiger or System Teams
These tend to be short-lived special purpose agile teams that are spun up to solve a specific problem or enable a valuable capability. These tend to be the same size as or smaller than a typical agile team but are often hand-picked based on availability and skill set as well as level of interest. These teams can last from a few days to a few months depending on the complexity of the problem that intend to conquer. System teams are typically associated with SAFe where a Tiger team has a similar function in other frameworks.
These can be somewhat disruptive to their home teams and may not be something that everyone is interested in doing. On the upside you can learn a lot about team dynamics and inspired growth opportunities. The downside is the home team might struggle to fill the void created and may not perform as well as they did with the full team.
The Collective Agile Team Type
This agile team type is a key feature of referenced as part of Fluid Adaptive Scaling Technology or FaST. It is very interesting alternative for some curious about very short delivery cycles, scaling and dynamic teaming.
Normally, the preference would be to keep a static team together for as long as possible. However, in this case the collective itself is the static element while the members within it can dynamically drift to where their skills are needed most. The ability to drift where needed is powerful for both the individuals and the group making it more fluid and social than other options. Which group you work with for the next few days is based on task priority along with individual skillset and availability.
This is a much larger type of agile team that goes well beyond the two-pizza rule explained earlier. Here you have all of the various team skills represented who operate within very short-lived sprints depending on the task at hand and the skills needed. The collective needs to be fully self-contained and equipped to do everything that they might ever need to do so that there are no external dependencies.
This team type operates within a hybrid approach. They have a big picture goal that could take several months to complete – not unlike SAFe. However, the plan itself is dynamic and could change along the way based on learning and feedback. Beyond that the collective operates from a large Kanban board.
With each 2.5-day cycle teams form around the next most important thing from the backlog and then each run with it in parallel. The WIP limit per team is 1 and the WIP limit for the collective depends on the size of the collective so could be many.
SAFe Agile Release Train or ART
An Agile Release Train is a collection of other agile teams that have banded together to focus on an individual Value Stream. This typically involves, Scrum, Kanban and System Teams working to deliver value in quarterly increments. This works out to be about 5 sprints of doing with 1 sprint devoted to planning the next increment and celebrating what was accomplished.
SAFe Solution Train
A Solution Train is simply a collective of Agile Release Trains. This team type is reserved for delivering the most complex projects involving thousands or people working a big picture delivery that could take years and multiple ART increments to implement.
We have a dojo for that
We like the Dojo style of learning where a small group can be extracted from the normal daily grind with a mission to enable a new capability or attacking a technical debt problem. It is well known that learning by doing offers far greater retention and enthusiasm for application over other options. We have created several NRM Dojo Jumpstarts many of which explore teaming options.