With 17 years experience in IT strategy and planning, IT governance, portfolio & program management, and business development, Arvind is presently working as VP &Regional ITCOO at Societe Generale. He is responsible for IT transformation initiatives and IT operations & performance. He is a thought leader, speaker has worked in Telecom, Retail, Insurance and Banking industry in US and Europe.

It’s always interested me to explore about how teams can be organized differently to achieve better results. I would like to discuss what are some of the challenges with the existing ways of organizing teams and what changes are happening to improve the team organization.

The Challenges
IT groups were predominately using Waterfall Software Development model before many started using Agile Methodologies.

Waterfall in a nutshell a sequential model, i.e. the software development phases follow in a sequence such as Requirement-> Design->Development->Test->Production->Operation. Therefore the teams working on these sequential phases were also formed in a manner that supported the waterfall model. In other words, there is a sequential handoff from one team to the other i.e. from BA to Development to Testing and so on. Another characteristics of this model was the teams specialized only in1 area (otherwise called as ‘I’ skills) i.e. Only Development or Testing and so on. This resulted in less collaboration among teams and formation of silos. These are typically the Component teams or Functional teams.

The Change
The IT waterfall model largely resembled the Manufacturing assembly lines from the Industrial revolution era. The world has changed with the advent of Internet and Digitalization. Customers are being more demanding and business more competitive. In order to meet these demands, many IT departments have switched from Waterfall to Agile mode to improve turnaround time and software quality.

Also the workforce is more connected than ever before and has transitioned from ‘task workers’ to ‘knowledge workers’. All these changes call for not only the change in process and tools to be more Agile but also begs a question that should we also think the way we organize our teams to improve Agility, Collaboration and Communication?

The Trends
Lot of companies have taken note of the how teams can be organized differently and showing us how ‘future of work’ looks like. I want to highlight some trends in area of team organization.

Scrum teams- Scrum teams are fundamental component of agile methodology. According to scrum alliance, Scrum Team consists of a Product Owner, the Development Team, and a Scrum Master. These self-organizing teams choose how best to accomplish their work, rather than being directed by others. These cross-functional teams have all competencies needed to accomplish the work without depending on others outside the team.

Scrum Teams deliver products iteratively and incrementally, maximizing opportunities for feedback.

Feature Teams– Feature team “is a long-lived, cross-functional, cross-component team that completes many end-to-end customer features”. Typically having 7 +/- 2 members. Feature teams are an essential element to scaling up agility. This concept is attributed to LeSS( Large Scale Scrum) framework.

Spotify Squads– Spotify, the music streaming leader, has created a framework to organize the organization into Squads, Tribes, Chapters, Guilds etc.

A squad is a smallest group similar to pizza team, scrum team, feature team.

Ideally each squad is fully autonomous with direct interaction with their users and no blocking dependencies to other squads. This design allows each team to function as a small startup.

The squads are grouped together in ‘Tribes’. ‘Chapters’ are groups working within a special area. ‘Guild’ is a community of members with shared interests.

Holacracy – Holacrac is org system with no job titles, no managers, no hierarchy and with Distributed Authority. Holacracy was developed by Brian Robertson. According to him, Holacracy is system of self-management in organisations. Holacracy replaces the traditional management hierarchy with a new peer-to-peer “operating system” that increases transparency, accountability, and organizational agility. Authority and decision making are distributed among holon “circles” throughout the organization.

Devops – Devops extends the Agility movement from development (Dev) to operations(Ops). So typical Devops team would have members from both development and operations like BA, Developers, testers and also folks from operations like DBA, Syadmin.

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