Martin Foster
Organizational System Designer and Principal Consultant at TeamForm
Melbourne, Australia
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I’m a principal consultant at TeamForm, specializing in organizational design and workforce planning for agile teams-of-teams. I work with large, typically 50,000 people+ orgs in their agile transformation / new ways of working programmes.
Primarily focussed on how teams get organised and changed at scale, and look at the mix of cross functional skills that are brought together to deliver on whatever their organization’s business objectives are. This work intersects organizational planning, funding, and change processes and programs.
I am grateful to the agile community for much of what I've learned across my career. To give back, along with Evan Leybourn of the Business Agility Institute, I’ve been one of the co-authors of the Business Agility Report since its inception in 2018. I enjoy working on the report because it focusses on whole of organization agility, and gives practitioners a data driven fact base to suggest where to invest for their next round of improvements. As a result of this work, I believe we're doing the right thing as practitioners promoting and embedding agile practices and ways of working.
Trading with other tribes: Get what you need through creating a common language
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” - Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride
In large organizations with hundreds or thousands of teams it’s important to see how work, people, and money combine to contribute to company strategy.
This is hard when people from different areas of an organization use language differently - using different terms for the same thing, or worse, using the same term to mean different things.
Achieving a common language, or at least a common understanding of how other people use language, can reduce misunderstandings, make metrics more meaningful and interchangeable, and enable people to move fluidly in and out of teams without having to learn a new language every time.
It connects people across silos, and maintains context as conversation (or reporting) moves up and down an organizational structure.
In this workshop, we will explore what terms are important to define and how to use different lenses and techniques to work towards a common language.
We will explore:
* language of work - how is work broken down, or connected up, what makes work “ready”, what does “done” actually mean?
* language of people - what do we mean by role, skill, position, etc, how do they change as people change?
* language of teams - what types of teams do you have, what is a team-of-teams, or a team-of-teams-of-teams, are they the same for each team type?
* language of money - can we talk about money in ways that won’t trigger risk reactions, if funding is lumpy how can we achieve good flow?
* approaches for making a common language commonly used - inviting, agreeing, capturing, mapping, and embedding.
Joining the Silos: Hard Lessons Learned while growing from 10 to over 1000 Teams
Teams are ideally persistent, connected and stable. This ideal of working in agile teams is severely challenged as the number of teams in an organization grows from the first 10 frontrunners to 100s then 1000s of teams. Leaders that don’t sense and respond to these challenges will struggle with delivery, which will existentially challenge teams and agile ways of working.
Be prepared. This talk will give you a toolkit to identify and overcome the most common challenges encountered when establishing, growing, running, and continuously delivering value through 1000s of teams.
Special attention will be placed on the challenges that result in extended lead times to value delivery.
* how do we keep sight of value, and the many teams delivering it?
* how do we deliver in a timely manner when value streams cut across many teams and multiple business units?
* how do we enable fast flow of value through teams?
* how do we ensure that critical teams remain funded?
This talk is for you if: you report to the CFO and are tasked with funding agile teams, you’re an agile coach struggling with growing and running teams as agile ways of working scale to 100s or 1000s of teams, a product owner frustrated with growing lead times, a scrum master constantly fighting escalations to re-prioritise work, and anyone wanting to work effectively with lots of teams.
Martin Foster
Organizational System Designer and Principal Consultant at TeamForm
Melbourne, Australia
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