What are agile team structures & why are they important?
Simply put, building agile team structures involves organising people into effective project groups. Instead of traditional top-down management, agile teams emphasise on collaboration, flexibility and delivering value quickly. Here are some common agile team structures:
- Cross-functional teams: Members have different skills needed for the project, like design, coding and testing. This ensures that all aspects of the work are covered without relying on specialists outside the team.
- Self-organising teams: Members have the freedom to decide how to do their work. They manage themselves, assign tasks and make decisions together, which boosts accountability and creativity.
- Scrum teams: These teams work in short bursts called sprints, usually 1-4 weeks long. Each team has specific roles like Product Owner (representing the customer), Scrum Master (facilitating the process) and Development Team (doing the work).
- Kanban teams: Workflows are visualised on a board with columns representing stages of completion. Team members move tasks across the board as they progress, helping everyone see what’s happening and where help might be needed.
These agile structures help teams adapt quickly to changes, collaborate effectively, deliver work faster and continuously improve their processes. They’re essential for modern businesses aiming to stay competitive and responsive to customer needs.
Agile team structures chart example
Below you can see an example of a best practice agile team structures in org.manager, a solution that allows you to create sophisticated views of your workforce, helping to automate a whole lot of manual work. In this example you can see:
- Org chart view: Inspired by Spotify’s agile team structures which consists of Squads, Tribes, Chapters and Guilds. The Spotify model is a flat hierarchy leveraging a collaborative work culture that allows its employees to move freely between and work on various projects.
- Network chart view: Shows how employees are connected to each other. It uses dots (nodes) to represent individuals/groups and lines (edges) to show the connections between them. This view is particularly powerful when using the visualisation rules, as they allow you to easily pinpoint any areas of concern across your teams.
Tip: This view can be completely customised based on your business requirements; therefore, you can display any data point that you store internally (from almost any source).
How using software to design agile team structures will improve your business
A dedicated software like org.manager allows you to instantly access many different alternative structures, helping you to see a cross-functional view of your entire organisation in just a few clicks.
By providing clear visual representations of team roles, responsibilities and relationships, these charts offer invaluable insights into organisational dynamics, resource allocation and project management.
Here are five ways that using a tool to design agile team structures can improve your business:
Streamlined planning and organisation: Access a tool that allows you to seamlessly organise teams, assign tasks and track progress. This simplifies the planning process, making it easier for managers to allocate resources effectively and ensure that all team members are aligned with project goals.
Increased flexibility and adaptability: Agile methodologies emphasise flexibility and adaptability to change. Software tools that support agile team structures enable teams to quickly reorganise, reprioritise and adjust their workflows in response to shifting requirements, market dynamics or stakeholder feedback.
Efficient resource management: By using an agile team design tool, you can optimise resources by easily identifying available capacity, skill gaps or overallocation of staff.
Enhanced stakeholder engagement: Visual representations of agile team structures and project progress can be shared with stakeholders, clients or executives to provide greater visibility and transparency into ongoing initiatives.
Clarity of roles and responsibilities: By providing visuals that clearly explain the roles and responsibilities of each team member within the agile framework, you can ensure that everyone understands their duties and who to approach for specific tasks or issues.
By using dedicated software, you can share your real-time agile team structures with anyone in your organisation. org.manager is Australian hosted and browser based, making it easy to access and share on any device.
Final thoughts
By visualising agile team structures in a org design tool, you can effectively organise your diverse skills and resources around a common goal. Which, in turn, helps to create better autonomy across teams, improving creativity and problem solving.
Navigo has 20+ years’ experience implementing successful workforce solutions across all industries in Australia. Book a demo today to discover how our portfolio of org design software will elevate the way you work.
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