Assign the Enablers

Step 2 – Assign The Enablers

Once we understand, which Product, or Service needs a Business Agility operating model, we can move onto Step #2 – Assign The Enablers.

Who do we assign to assign The Enablers? Is an interesting question that we will leave up to you to answer.

A suggestion, is that someone from within the Leadership community, would make the most sense. Although, if you have someone else in mind, that’s ok too.

Ideally, we want a Product, or Service Team that can manage end-to-end Product/Service value streams. Whether these are development, support or any other type of Product/Service-specific value stream it should be managed by an Agile Team.

This is to reduce the likelihood of a bottleneck existing outside of the Agile Team’s control.

There will be many Product/Service-specific value streams, across an entire Customer Journey.

So, Customer Journey Mapping (CJM) is a useful technique to help identify, the Agile Customers, The Agile Teams, and The Agile Leaders that will enable the Agile Team.

What if we need more than one Agile Team?

Step 2 – Smaller Product/Service Scope versus Multiple Teams

What if we need more than one Agile Team, to manage the entire Customer Journey?

Within the Agile Software Development world, team size was often restricted to 7 people, +/- 2. Sometimes referred to as the two-pizza rule.

We do not impose any limitations within the businessagility.works framework.

This is because, everything revolves around the achievement of The Goal. If you can achieve The Goal, with an Agile Team of x7 people, then that’s good. If you need x20 people, that’s also good.

But, what if the team size is limiting your ability to achieve The Goal? Then, you need to change the way you are organised.

There are a couple of options here for you to consider:

  1. Can you break down the scope of one big Product/Service into smaller Products/Services that can achieve ‘their’ Goal, with a smaller team?
  2. Can you assign multiple teams, to work from a single Product/Service backlog?

These are only two examples. Ultimately, only you will be able to determine the most appropriate Enabler-organisation design, to achieve The Goal.