Positions and Career Path in Agile Organization

Considering the shift from siloed based departments with subject matter experts focusing on their specialization in traditional organizations to more general cross-functional teams where members combine different skills to maximize the value in agile organizations, there is a trend to generalize positions and flatten the career path as the hierarchy got less important. Agile organizations are moving from fixed detailed positions to t-shaped skill positions or even no-positions at all, with emergent roles depending on the actual need. They abandon the skills based positions and creating a competence based model where employees are deciding what is their journey going to be. We optimize for flexibility and career mobility. The reason for such shift is again dealing with VUCA challenges as the world becomes too volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous for pre-defined skilled based roles. Agile organizations need flexibility. They need to react fast on any changes in the business environment, are there new competitors offering different value, are there new technologies emerging, are there new challenges in the market, those are just a few questions you can ask. But there is no doubt that the world is not the same anymore. To deal with changes and support the people growth, Agile organizations invest in developing coaching and mentoring programs, and encouraging the internal workshops led by employees where they teach each other.

From my experience, from organizational design perspective, the hardest to imagine is the flat structure where leadership is emergent, and no fixed positions even exists. People are developing roles for themselves based on the current situation and needs, teams are forming around business challenges and adjourning once the challenge is solved. It’s a liquid structure. Very flexible, and very purpose driven. It’s one of those things you need to experience to be able to believe in it. And that’s a chicken – egg problem. What helped me was the experience from our Scrum teams, where I could see how self-organization works at the team level. And then applying it to large ecosystem was simply just using the same skills I was used to apply at the team level. In such environment where people take over the ownership and responsibility for doing their best to maximize the value and achieve the purpose, the detailed positions become irrelevant as teams are cross-functional and individuals t-shaped skilled. Then you can freely remove them, as they are not needed anymore. Quite straightforward. The culture and mindset goes first, the practices will follow. 

Now if my last paragraph was way too far for you, the first small step you can start with even in very traditional environment is to shift from managing individuals to team collaboration. The more they collaborate, they develop the T-shaped skills for each individual. It still doesn’t mean that every single person can do everything the same way as anybody else, but they can actually help each other, they can review and test each other’s work, and they understand the whole little by little. T-shirt are not taking too much effort and are creating a ground for forming cross-functional teams. Once you have a cross-functional team, as first step, you can shift from skill-based roles which are not applicable anymore – like tester, software developer, UX designer, business analyst, etc. to general roles – i.e. team member, engineer or as Scrum call is ‘developer’ (note in Scrum we don’t mean ‘software developer’ but ‘product developer’).

It’s not that hard. Collaboration is fun and t-shaped skills are going really fast. On that journey, detailed positions becomes very soon redundant, and soon after, the career path will reflect the dynamics of the organizational design. People in such organizations are not motivated by given career ladder. They care about their opportunity for growth and personal development.

From Good to Great: Cross-Functional Teams

Next blog in the “From Good to Great” series (Don’t Copy Find Your Own Way, Radical Transparency, Agile Mindset, and Collaboration) is focusing on cross-functional teams. It seems like basics, but I realized that organizations still don’t fully understand why the cross-functional teams are critical to Agile and Scrum success. I guess it is grounded in the fundamental mindset shift, where the organizational focus is moving from functionality driven to the value driven. In traditional organizations, the delivery of functionality was the key. That’s what we focused on and that’s what we measure. It’s the world of allocation and reworks caused by misalignment which all over creates so many dependencies, that delivering end to end feature is a nightmare and takes forever.

Component teams

Business value

In agile organizations, the focus is changing to deliver business value. And here is the problem. Business value is hard to measure before you get feedback from the customers and users. There is no formula. All you have to do is to get feedback fast and inspect and adapt based on that. And here we are: the cross-functional team is an enabler of fast feedback as there is no way users will give you quality feedback on the backend or one system change while they have a hard time to imagine what does it mean for them. They give feedback on the end to end functionality, that actually often goes across all the technologies and systems in your organization. As such, teams need to be able to deliver value end to end. Otherwise, you are mentally at the manufacturing line where teams work in sequential mode and trying to parallelize this work creates so many dependencies that are making your life hell and preventing teams to focus on the value. They micro-focus on the part of functionality without seeing the whole and the feedback will suffer.

Cross-functional teams

The typical misunderstanding is that cross-functional team means that everyone needs to be expert on everything. But that’s not needed. All we need to have is a team willing to learn and take over responsibility for the end to end value delivery. A team, which can take any item from the backlog (which is end-to-end functionality which brings the value by the definition) and finish it together. They don’t need to take it as individuals, they collaborate as a team. In most of the cases, it’s not that hard in reality once you overcome the initial resistance of team members and the overspecialization mindset of the organization. Try it, and see that I was right :).

Impact

In addition to what has been said, we don’t do functionality because we can, we don’t do it because we believe there is a value, we implement it as we expect something to happen. It is impact driven, strategic approach. And that’s a game changer. In order to be able to measure impact, we need to be able to deliver working product frequently so you can really see how different functionalities changing people behavior. And to do that, cross-functional teams are the essential enabler.

During their agile journey, companies often ask what shall we do if we can’t have cross-functional teams. And the truth is I don’t know, except make it happen. It only needs courage and focus, which are two of the Scrum values after all so nothing new. All over, Agile without cross-functional teams is only empty process, kind of a fake agile where we are using the terminology but not changing the mindset at all.