Embracing the team of teams (TOT) approach

In today’s business landscape, singular teams, regardless of their proficiency, often find themselves challenged by intricate problems that necessitate a broader, collective approach. This section highlights the importance of collaboration, from recognizing the limits of individual teams to strategically coordinating multiple units. In scrum parlance, these integrated team concepts are known as Scrum-of-Scrums (SoS).

SoS is a concept that naturally evolved from the Scrum framework as organizations tried to scale their Agile practices to larger groups or teams. The origin of SoS is not attributed to a single individual but emerged as a way for multiple Scrum teams to coordinate and communicate effectively. In this book, we’ll use a more general term, team-of-teams (ToT).

The ToT approach has been popularized in the Scaled Agile Framework® as an Agile Release Train (ART), the description of which is beyond the scope of this book. However, for those who want to dive deeper, check out SAFe® Distilled by Richard Knaster and Dean Leffingwell.5

By exploring the ToT concept and insights from leaders such as General Stanley McChrystal, our objective is to equip you with the understanding required to manage and lead in large and complex environments. This knowledge serves as a foundation for enhancing enterprise agility, fostering inter-team synergy, and ensuring cohesive, value-driven outcomes.

No matter how efficient a team is, there are boundaries to what it can achieve alone, especially when dealing with large-scale complexities. Recognizing this limitation is the first step to creating a holistic, collaborative approach.

When facing large-scale complexities, you will learn to recognize the limitations of relying solely on individual teams and understand the necessity of extensive collaboration across multiple teams to address these multifaceted challenges.

Orchestrating the combined efforts of multiple teams requires skill. It’s not about micro-management but harmonizing. Regular cadence and synchronization, shared tools, and platforms, along with fostering a culture of open communication, ensure that the multiple cogs of this vast machine are aligned.

Lastly, you will enhance the ToT’s capability to steer collaborative endeavors, synchronize efforts, ensure harmony across teams, and direct the collective toward continuous value delivery.

In managing all the activities across a product’s life cycle, except for the very smallest of companies, one Agile team cannot do it all. This is where the concept of a ToT becomes invaluable. It’s not just a scaling-up of resources; it’s about scaling collaboration, synchronization, and the shared ownership of outcomes.

• Integrated Workflow: A team-of-teams approach promotes interconnected value delivery, where each team’s output feeds into another, ensuring collaborative rather than just sequential integration for success.
• Managing dependencies: Multi-team environments come with dependencies. Recognizing and addressing them proactively is critical. This approach provides an overarching perspective to anticipate and handle dependencies, preventing misalignments and delays.
• Synchronized delivery: More than individual milestones, a cohesive final product requires teams to align efforts. Scaled Scrum frameworks such as the SoS, SAFe® Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), and NEXUS facilitate this alignment, ensuring a unified solution that fulfills overarching objectives.
• Promoting collaboration: The ToT mindset goes beyond task integration; it instills a sense of shared purpose, mutual respect, and collective drive, solidifying teams as parts of a cohesive whole.

In conclusion, as organizations strive to tackle more significant challenges and cater to diverse customer needs, the ToT concept becomes more than just a logistical necessity; it’s a strategic imperative. By fostering integrated workflows, addressing dependencies, synchronizing efforts, and nurturing a collaborative spirit, organizations can harness the collective strength of their teams, turning intricate challenges into groundbreaking solutions.

Adopting insights from the ToT philosophy

The ToT approach is fundamental when dealing with Agile scaling frameworks such as the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®), LeSS, SoS, and others. These frameworks specifically address the challenges of scaling Agile across large enterprises with multiple teams working on interconnected components of a larger product or service.

The developers of these competing frameworks actively seek to differentiate their approaches from a value-added perspective. Still, we can find some common ground among them. Here are some examples:

• Adapting to complexity: This involves highlighting that in complex environments, hierarchical structures and traditional management methodologies fall short. ToT concepts provide a structure that’s both flexible and integrated, allowing for faster decision-making in rapidly changing scenarios.
• Shared mission: This is a crucial principle where everyone understands the mission and has access to the information they need to execute it. In the context of Agile teams, this means every team understands the broader product vision and how their work supports the larger and holistic vision.
• Empowered execution: Individual teams have autonomy and are empowered to make decisions. They’re not just following a set of predefined tasks but are dynamically adapting to the situation on the ground.
• ToT Liaisons: Introduce ToT liaison roles to improve communication and manage challenges and dependencies across teams.

These four guides help synchronize, coordinate, and integrate the work of multiple small teams, while also extending Agile principles and practices to a multi-team environment.

It is beyond the scope of this book to evaluate these disparate approaches and frameworks for scaled Agile practices. However, for those who want to take a deeper dive, check out Cecil Rupp’s book, Scaling Scrum Across Modern Enterprises .2