5.2: Agile Team Topology and Organizational Structure - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->Now, let us talk about Agile team organization</v> and the largest structure at the company level. Scrum teams are usually small, self-organizing, cross-functional groups of individuals. These self-organizing teams make their own decisions on how to accomplish their work rather than being told how they should be doing it. Cross-functional teams have all the competencies they need to accomplish the work without dependencies on other teams. So overall, the team model in Scrum and in Agile in general is designed to optimize the software development flow and that allows them to achieve high value and productivity. It's important to maintain the right size for Scrum teams. The most frequent Scrum team size is from five to nine people, but there is no strict constraint. Scrum values for those teams include commitment, courage, focus, openness, and respect. All of those values are embodied and lived by the Scrum team. Given that teams stay together for a long time, it is logical to have a team as a nuclear, small structure within the organization. However, the question then arises, how is this team going to fit within the larger organization as a whole within the whole company, not just by role and function, but also in terms of the skills that the members bring to the group? There are three major organizational structure categories that are shown on this slide. The first one is functional or centralized organization. This is the most frequent organizational structure. Those companies include departments where people have the same skill sets: developers, testers, business analyst, system administrators, project managers, so on. The second one is multi-divisional organization. This type is based on divisions building products with adjacent functionality serving the same market. For example, if you think consumer banking, it's investment banking, investment management, asset management, and proper consumer banking and loan functions. The third one is a matrix organization. Matrix organizational structure is when each employee reports to multiple managers, one usually being a competency manager, such as head of product managers for product management and technical lead for developers, head of business analysis for business analysts, and so forth. And on the other hand, there is a functional manager and that depends on the product that they're building or on the division. Say, in a bank, it would be commercial banking, consumer banking, investment management, private wealth management, asset management, and so forth. Matrix organizational structure was developed first in the aerospace industry in the '50s and is still widely adopted in multiple industries. So in some Agile companies adopt flexible structures. Usually they mix business and technology and they focus on customer and product-focused flexibility.