Interacting with Other Teams

One aspect of enterprise awareness is the recognition that your team doesn’t work in a vacuum; other teams are working in parallel to your own. Some teams are focused on solution delivery, whereas others focus on specialist aspects of development, such as data management, operations, and quality management. These other teams may work in an agile manner or a non-agile manner, and they may or may not need to interact with your team. Regardless, you need to find a way to work with them.

There are several general techniques to consider first. For specialist teams such as your enterprise architects or technical writers, the best strategy is to embed individuals on your team so that their expertise is added to your overall skills pool. Ideally these people will share their skills with others on the team, pick up new skills of their own, and become more versatile generalizing specialists. Some people may be embedded on your team on a part-time basis or for a short period of time and thereby take on specialist/expert roles as discussed in Chapter 4, and therefore may be less likely to become generalizing specialists. Another general strategy, particularly useful when you primarily need to coordinate with an external team, is to invite one of their representatives to your coordination meetings (and potentially send someone to theirs). You may also consider asking people from these other teams to be actively involved in your requirements and architecture efforts during Inception, as appropriate, to ensure you address their concerns in your overall vision. With external teams new to agile you may find it worthwhile to educate them about DAD so as to address any misunderstandings they may have about your approach, and to give them greater insight into how they can work with you effectively.