Breaking team silos with Kanban

We changed a lot of things when we switched to Kanban. Fortunately most of the changes worked out well. (Read here about one that didn’t go that well.) One of the major moves was the reorganization of our team structure.

Our initial structure was as follows:

  • Three teams with 3-5 members each
  • Common codebase
  • All teams and their members co-located
  • Teams have a different focus (e.g. new products or small new improvements to existing product)

This team structure was based on the allocation of effort across different business areas. Number of people on the team was the weighting factor.

This lead to several challenges:

  • Teams were divided and merged as new projects started or ended, which had a lot of overhead
  • Different focus areas sometimes led to contradictory goals, which led to blame (see cartoon below)
  • Teams became silos around certain domain areas
  • Teams didn’t help each other since helping might mean they would sacrifice their own goals

So we switched to a new structure:

  • One big group (three teams combined)
  • Everyone works off the same Kanban-board
  • Focus areas are swim lanes on the board
  • Weighting is done by adjusting WIP-limits
  • No one is assigned to any lane, developers self-organize around work

The results of the change have been very positive. Developers have more freedom in choosing their work and they actively try to prevent silos. They can also better self-organize, e.g. build a subteam with just the right people for a certain work item. Changing business focus has little overhead since we only need to change the WIP-limits on our board. All goals are common so helping others is natural.

The results also inspired me and a colleague of mine, Arto Eskelinen, to create a workshop around this. Our session was accepted to Agile2011 so we’ll be running it in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA in August 2011. It’s called “Experiments: how does team structure affect responsibility?”. Don’t miss it!

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About author

My name is Sami Honkonen. I work as a consultant at Reaktor in Helsinki, Finland. I have a developer background, but lately I've steered more towards systems thinking and coaching. I sing in a death metal band called Embreach.

More about author on the About-page.

| May 31st, 2011 | Posted in kanban |

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