Collaborating Across Team Boundaries

No team is an island. Even widely cross-functional and highly autonomous teams need to collaborate with various partners inside the organization to fulfill their mission. Here are some ideas I’ve come across over the years, that might be useful in your organization. - Tobias

Meetings

Release planning workshop
Shared sprint planning
Open space
Big room planning
Cross-boundary retrospectives
Multi team product backlog refinement
Planning one feature together
Visit other team’s standups

Visualizations
Shared ”portfolio/program”-oobeya/kanban
High quality product backlog (e.g. shared story map)
Explicit value model to guide prioritization
Shared impediment backlog/improvement kanban

Organization

Feature (McCarthy, Larman) or product teams (Cagan)
Chief/lead product owner
Product owner team, with own coach/scrum master
Team of teams
Scrum of scrums + “scrum of scrums master”
Release team
Integration team with reps from dev teams
Component mentors/stewards/guardians
Visiting team members
Dynamic reteaming (see Helfand)
Membership in two teams
Improvement team

Physical Workplace

Team spaces/areas
Cross team kanban boards/story maps/etc
Spaces for cross boundary collaboration
Access to workshop rooms
Whiteboards, wall space (allowed to be used)
”Fika”/shared meal spaces

Digital Workplace

Digital real time whiteboard
Shared documents
Wikis
Issue trackers/backlog management tools
Chat
Video conferencing

Working Agreements

Internal open source
Harmonized definition of done
Continuous integration/trunk based development
PMV (“prata med varandra” (swe) i.e. “just talk”
Explicit responsibility plus coaching for teams to collaborate and integrate with other teams

Collaborations (Larman/Vodde)

Do the task for another team (in ”their” code base)
Pairing/mobbing across team boundaries
Split the task so that the part the ”other team” needs to do becomes smaller
Implement with stub now, complete later

Interaction Patterns (Skelton/Pais)

Collaboration
X-as-a-service
Facilitating

“Team-API” (Skelton/Pais)

Code
Versioning
Wiki, documentation
Ways of working
Ways of communicating
Information: status, plans, prio

About Tobias Fors

Tobias Fors is a consultant and trainer for tech intensive organizations. With 20 years of experience from operative and consultative roles, he helps modern leaders take the next step in their organization's agile improvement journey. Tobias Fors is a Certified Scrum Trainer with the Scrum Alliance and founder of Holifant AB. Motto: Deliver and Learn!