Agile from business to technology

This is how I scale agile towards business and towards technology.:

Where:

• In the center we have an agile process that blends team process and product process.
• To the right we have a business process that ties into the product process.
• To the left we have a technology process (expertise process to be general) that ties into the team process.

To be honest, this is my minimal theoretical business to technology agile process. In practice, a specific agile process is chosen, with process steps and process artefacts. People like to say that agile is about people, not process. Yet people need to communicate, and the common vocabulary for that is given by a process.

Deepening in to the product business view (right side above):

Where:

• The core agile process (blue) delivers features and deliverables that are part of a product and business goals.
• These deliverables are picked-up by customers
• The features and deliverable sustain (or not) the customers competitivity within its market segment
• The product owner (in scrum terminology) is the expert that guides the product with regards to the customer needs.

We can do that also for technology/engineering (left above):

Where:

• The core agile process (blue) includes experts within the team.
• The experts enable/produce the technical/engineering needs of the features and deliverables.
• The expert individuals may be experts in different domains.
• Coordinating technology/engineering frameworks allow experts to work both as individuals and in coordination (within their team).

Many domains of technical expertise are possible. Above are the ones closer to my experience.

Note:

• The complete process above needs to coordinate at least SIX streams.
  A minimal agile process only presents three streams (team vs product vs customer). 
• Each of these (six) streams will naturally be driven at their own different rate!
• Your job, as CTO / engineering lead is to work with individuals, teams and product to pace work within these different streams to achieve an optimal throughput!
•  Think laminar flow! Productive is as fast as you can go before things become turbulent!

I wrote this up as a (much longer) slide deck, and am always happy to share my experiences!

All original content copyright James Litsios, 2022.