Tuesday, March 11, 2014

How to Make Feature Teams Work for You

Let's say that I'm a CTO, and my IT program management is a mess. I can't allocate budget based on business priorities and company-wide initiatives. So I decide to unify all my IT force into a single pool of resources, and divide them into short-lived feature teams, formed around my current priorities. As my priorities change, I dissolve some teams and form others. And it is like a dream come true: now I can allocate my budget easily, have predictability into my spend, and avoid wasting money into projects that are not aligned with my goals. Or is it?

Let’s look at this a bit in detail. Feature teams will either work on existing assets, or develop new ones, and perhaps decommission old ones in the process. Now, what will be the state of these assets while feature teams work on delivering to their respective initiatives?

Consider the following analogy. Let's say that every one of my IT assets, be it an application or a backend service, is an airplane. Some teams are building new airplanes. Other teams are adding capabilities to existing airplanes. Some airplanes are in-flight, delivering business value. Some airplanes require more maintenance than others. But each one has its specialized flying instructions and maintenance procedures. Consider my feature teams to be the flying and maintenance crews. Based on my business priorities, I assign crews to airplanes; building new ones, adding capabilities to existing ones, or decommissioning and replacing some, or part thereof, with others, or parts thereof. All the while keeping all airplanes flying.

No, wait, who is keeping the airplanes flying? That is not a business imperative of any of the feature teams. An implicit assumption, maybe? Is there a separate maintenance crew to keep all airplanes flying? How are we going to ensure that that feature teams will respect the flying procedure of each airplane?

And how are we going to ensure that feature teams will not step on each other's toes? How do we ensure that the flying integrity of each airplane is not compromised?

If someone would tell me that this is similar to the model popularized by Spotify, then I would respectfully beg to differ. And in short, we can't simply wish for all the benefits of feature teams, while ignoring all the challenges above.

Let's agree on one thing first: I should be able to shift some of my budget and resources to respond to my current priorities. And at the same time, I should keep all my assets healthy, and all my airplanes in a perfect flying condition.

How can achieve both these goals?

It is imperative that I keep a focused, long lived team around every one of my assets. The size of this team will depend on the complexity of each asset. We can even have a team be responsible for multiple assets.
In addition to these asset teams, we can still have our feature teams. But if a feature team would like to modify an asset to deliver a business need, they will have to embed into, or extend, the core asset team. This extended team will have to work in harmony to preserve the integrity of the asset, ensure the compatibility of the new implementation with the existing architecture, and alignment with the long term goals for that asset. Any changes will need to be approved by the core team. If they need to change multiple assets, then they'll have to divide up, or work on one at a time. There could be multiple feature teams extending the same core team for one asset. If this is the case, or if there is an asset that undergoes continuous changes by multiple feature teams, consider expanding this asset's core team.

This way, you'll ensure that all your airplanes are in a sound flying condition, and that none will go crashing on you, because of the lack of maintenance, or because different crews trying to pull them in different directions.