Populate your Team Structure
Mapping your organization's Team structure is key to a streamlined adoption of VSM
In VSM, Teams are intended to represent ownership of software artifacts and domains. The Team Factsheet holds multiple dimensions:
- Name - Simply the name of the team.
- Ownership of Software Artifacts - What Software Artifacts are this team's responsibility?
- Ownership of Domains Artifacts - What Domains are this team's responsibility?
- Team hierarchy - How are Teams organized, e.g. into Tribes or Agile Release Trains?
- Team typology - Stream-aligned, Enabling, Complicated Subsystem, or Platform Team?
- Team location - Reflects location of Teams, including virtual Teams.
To create an inventory of your Teams and corresponding dimensions, follow the guide below.
1. Create Team Fact Sheets
VSM supports you to upload Team data quickly via the following options:
- Create Team Fact Sheets via the Inventory menu
- Importing data from an Excel file
- Use a Discovery Source like GitHub Repository to automatically upload Team structures into Fact Sheets.
Best Practice:
Mapping your organization's Team structure is key to a streamlined adoption of VSM. If you don't have a Discovery Source available covering all dimensions, create the Team Fact Sheets yourself. This is the quickest way to get your results. Also, Team information is unlikely to change constantly, thus it requires minimal effort to maintain the data over longer periods of time.
2. Populate your Team Fact Sheets
Populate your Team Fact Sheets with the Fields/Relations/Tags listed below.
| Description | Field/Relation/Tag | |
|---|---|---|
| Name & Description | The responsible development Team behind the Software Artifact, allowing easy identification of owners. Make sure to provide a meaningful description of your Teams, this helps to engage more easily with various stakeholder groups. | Standard Field |
| Ownership | Represented by a relation from Team to Software Artifact. | Standard Relation |
| Team hierarchy | Use Parent/Child relationships to group Teams into Tribes. This will allow you to create nicely clustered Team Landscape reports. Use Tags and Custom Fields to bring in more context and detail on your Team structure. | Standard Relation |
| Team typology | The Team type has a big impact on the way the Team interacts with other ones. A good way to depict this is the Team topology based on Matthew Skelton's and Manuel Pais' concept published in IT revolution in 2017: Stream-aligned Team - aligned to a flow of work from (usually) a segment of the business domain Enabling Team - helps a Stream-aligned Team to overcome obstacles. Also detects missing capabilities. * Complicated Subsystem Team - where significant mathematics/calculation/technical expertise is needed *Platform Team - a grouping of other Team types that provide a compelling internal product to accelerate delivery by Stream- aligned Teams. https://teamtopologies.com/book | Custom Tag How to create Tags |
| Team location | Use a Tag Group to represent your Team Locations. Software Engineering Teams are often scattered all over the world and some work fully remotely. Knowing where the Teams are located helps with managing time zone differences or holidays. | Custom Tag How to create Tags |
3. Utilize Reports & Diagrams
Landscape reports - give an overview of your microservice or deployment landscape, grouped by Product, Team, Compute Environment, or others. With the report views, you can create color-coded heat maps of your landscapes.
Matrix reports - give you a color-coded overview of Fact Sheets like Software Artifacts or Deployments grouped by two Fact Sheet types in a Matrix.
Diagrams - present a more flexible way of visualizing your data as well as enhancing the visualization by drawing sketches, connections and architecture languages.
Updated over 1 year ago
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