Roadmap: How to Adopt the Team of Teams Practice
This roadmap describes how to adopt the team of teams practice. It helps an organization get prepared for developing and delivering software incrementally, coordinating the work of a project leadership teams and various sub teams.
Main Description

Getting Started

Project leadership teams and sub teams work in coordination. The project leadership team oversees the work and sets direction for the sub teams, by defining the high level objectives and themes for each iteration and capturing that information in an Iteration Plan (Project Level). The objectives help determine the stories that should be mapped to the iteration. The sub teams use the objectives and themes identified by the project leadership team and plan for their work in the iteration, capturing the details in an Iteration Plan (Team Level).

During the course of an iteration, sub teams monitor the status and progress of their own work and report it to the project leadership team. Any dependencies between teams are identified and resolved via this collaboration throughout the iterations.

At the end of each iteration, teams assess and report results to the project leadership team. Teams also perform retrospectives to understand what went well and what didn't, so they can improve the way they work within the team and collaborate with other teams. All teams collectively present the results of an iteration to stakeholders to show tangible progress and gather feedback.

Example of how to adopt this practice

One example of how to adopt this practice is depicted in Figure 1.

The project leadership team initializes and configures the project, then provides overall planning, measurement, and steering for each iteration. Multiple sub teams (also referred to as feature teams) run iterations at the same time, providing measurable and valuable results at the end of each iteration. An independent test team also participates in this structure during a stabilization period at the end of each iteration and before the transition of the project outcome into production.

Team of teams in the context of a release lifecycle

Figure 1 - example of a team of teams structure in the context of lifecycle phases with multiple iterations