Scale up delivery without adding more teams

Teams reach a natural limit to their throughput, or capacity, that becomes difficult to improve upon based upon their current structure.

By splitting teams into smaller ones - either virtually or literally - it is possible to increase the throughput of work.  This is because smaller teams are able to align faster, and focus better on a smaller backlog of work.  Agile ceremonies are much shorter because less people speak, and fewer people have to comprehend and agree on issues.

Scaling up in this context means increasing the amount of throughput that teams can deliver, often without having to increase the amount of teams, or the number of people. 

This course is for people working in Agile software development, whether Scrum or Kanban or otherwise, and who needs to improve the amount of throughput their teams deliver.

Types of roles that should attend this course include; Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Enterprise Agile Coaches, Transformation Leaders, Project Managers, Project Management Office staff, Program Managers, Portfolio Managers, Delivery Managers, Org Designers, Agile Designers, and so on. 

This course is open to any members of an IT team, and also to managers who need to improve the amount of work completed by their teams.

This course is for people with intermediate to advanced skills in Agile delivery and project delivery.  It is designed to help teams improve their performance by measuring and increasing their throughput of work.  

Many teams are being asked to increase the amount of work items they deliver or increase their Velocity to demonstrate that they are improving their performance.  This course assists by showing you how to deliver more work items by splitting a larger team into smaller ones, and then delivering more work in parallel.

This requires a solid understanding of the nature of work your teams are delivering, and the skills of the people in your teams, and their ability to split work between them and complete it in parallel.

MODULE 1

How to split large Agile teams into smaller ones

• How to identify which skills are needed in each team
• How to identify and narrow down domain knowledge and areas of responsibility for a team
• How to ensure there is sufficient support for existing software

MODULE 2

How to easily coordinate teams

• How to coordinate work across multiple teams, especially where there is cross-team dependencies
• How to combine Sprint planning across teams to maximise planning effectiveness
• How to manage cross-team dependencies

Splitting a larger team into two smaller ones provides one main performance improvement:

1. The amount of work the team can complete within a given timeframe increases.  This is usually known as Throughput, and it measures how many work items are Done.  The timeframe can be a Sprint, or it can be a measure of your choice if you are working in Kanban or similar.
   
   
2. Another potential performance improvement that can be measured is the speed with which decisions get made.  Making decisions more rapidly results in reduced Lead Time.  It is likely that Lead Time will decrease as a result of splitting teams as well, and can also be measured as a performance improvement.