A Concept for Extending the Spotify Organisational Model to Cater for Platform Organisations

Modern platform organizations together with modular producers operate in an ecosystem with various role-players. These role-players all form part of a product or service that is delivered to the customer. Currently, organizations are implementing organizational models of the Spotify type to enhance their agility. This Spotify model works if the organization is an island by itself but within an ecosystem, this is not sufficient. Although the Spotify Organizational Model has been used in many agile contexts to increase flow and collaboration, it has not been adapted for platform organizations and the ecosystems they are part of. We propose a conceptual model that addresses this deficiency. Our conceptual model builds on the theory of the flow of work and the Spotify organizational model. We then extend this model to resolve the tensions created by the notion of a platform organization

Using Guilds to Foster Internal Startups in Large Organizations: A Case Study

Software product innovation in large organizations is fundamentally challenging because of restrained freedom and flexibility to conduct experiments. As a response, large agile companies form internal startups to initiate employ-driven innovation, inspired by Lean startup. This case study investigates how communities of practice support five internal startups in developing new software products within a large organization. We observed six communities of practice meetings, two workshops and conducted ten semi-structured interviews over the course of a year. Our findings show that a community of practice, called the Innovation guild, allowed internal startups to help each other by collectively solving problems, creating shared practices, and sharing knowledge. This study confirms that benefits documented in earlier research into CoPs also hold true in the context of software product innovation in large organizations. Henceforth, we suggest that similar innovation guilds, as described in this paper, can support large companies in the innovation race for new software products.publishedVersio

Understanding the Difference between Office Presence and Co-presence in Team Member Interactions

Although the public health emergency related to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has officially ended, many software developers still work partly from home. Agile teams that coordinate their office time foster a sense of unity, collaboration, and cohesion among team members. In contrast, teams with limited co-presence may experience challenges in establishing psychological safety and developing a cohesive and inclusive team culture, potentially hindering effective communication, knowledge sharing, and trust building. Therefore, the effect of agile team members not being co-located daily must be investigated. We explore the co-presence patterns of 17 agile teams in a large agile telecommunications company whose employees work partly from home. Based on office access card data, we found significant variation in co-presence practices. Some teams exhibited a coordinated approach, ensuring team members are simultaneously present at the office. However, other teams demonstrated fragmented co-presence, with only small subgroups of members meeting in person and the remainder rarely interacting with their team members face-to-face. Thus, high average office presence in the team does not necessarily imply that team members meet often in person at the office. In contrast, non-coordinated teams may have both high average office presence and low frequency of in-person interactions among the members. Our results suggest that the promotion of mere office presence without coordinated co-presence is based on a false assumption that good average attendance levels guarantee frequent personal interactions. These findings carry important implications for research on long-term team dynamics and practice.Comment: the 57th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (Hicss 2024

An architecture governance approach for Agile development by tailoring the Spotify model

The role of software architecture in large-scale Agile development is important because several teams need to work together to release a single software product while helping to maximise teams’ autonomy. Governing and aligning Agile architecture across autonomous squads (i.e., teams), when using the Spotify model, is a challenge because the Spotify model lacks practices for addressing Agile architecture governance. To explore how software architecture can be governed and aligned by scaling the Spotify model, we conducted a longitudinal embedded case study in a multinational FinTech organisation. Then, we developed and evaluated an approach for architectural governance by conducting an embedded case study. The collected data was analysed using Thematic Analysis and informed by selected Grounded Theory techniques such as memoing, open coding, constant comparison, and sorting. Our approach for architectural governance comprises an organisational structure change and an architecture change management process. The benefits reported by the practitioners include devolving architectural decision-making to the operational level (i.e., Architecture Owners), enhancing architectural knowledge sharing among squads, minimising wasted effort in architectural refactoring, and other benefits. The practitioners in our case study realised an improved squad autonomy by the ability to govern and align architectural decisions. We provide two key contributions in this paper. First, we present the characteristics of our proposed architectural governance approach, its evaluation, benefits, and challenges. Second, we present how the novel Heterogeneous Tailoring model was enhanced to accommodate our architectural governance approach

Improving productivity through corporate hackathons: A multiple case study of two large-scale agile organizations

Software development companies organize hackathons to encourage innovation. Despite many benefits of hackathons, in large-scale agile organizations where many teams work together, stopping the ongoing work results in a significant decrease in the immediate output. Motivated by the need to understand whether and how to run hackathons, we investigated how the practice affects productivity on the individual and organizational levels. By mapping the benefits and challenges to an established productivity framework, we found that hackathons improve developers' satisfaction and well-being, strengthen the company culture, improve performance (as many ideas are tested), increase activity (as the ideas are developed quickly), and improve communication and collaboration (because the social network is strengthened). Addressing managerial concerns, we found that hackathons also increase efficiency and flow because people learn to complete work and make progress quickly, and they build new competence. Finally, with respect to virtual hackathons we found that developers work more in isolation because tasks are split between team members resulting in less collaboration. This means that some important, expected hackathon values in virtual contexts require extra effort and cannot be taken for granted

Large-Scale Agile Frameworks: A Comparative Review

This study aims to identify and systematically compare the main large-scale agile frameworks that companies can adopt to manage the work of large-scale and distributed teams. Through this, companies can more consciously perform a better-informed decision on the choice of the framework that best fits the practices and challenges of their organizations. This work employs a qualitative approach supported by an exploratory analysis that identifies and explores the processes of migration to a large-scale agile. In the first phase, fifteen assessment criteria for scaling agile are discussed. In a second phase, these criteria are used to perform a comparative analysis of six large-scale agile frameworks (i.e., DAD, LeSS, Nexus, SAFe, Scrum at Scale, and Spotify). The findings reveal there isn't a dominant large-scale agile framework in all dimensions. However, it is possible to identify frameworks like Nexus and Spotify that target smaller teams and offer low technical complexity. These frameworks easily accommodate changes, while there are other frameworks like SAFe and DAD that offer high levels of scalability but require more demanding and deep efforts in changing work processes in an organization

The Agile Coach Role: Coaching for Agile Performance Impact

It is increasingly common to introduce agile coaches to help gain speed and advantage in agile companies. Following the success of Spotify, the role of the agile coach has branched out in terms of tasks and responsibilities, but little research has been conducted to examine how this role is practiced. This paper examines the role of the agile coach through 19 semi-structured interviews with agile coaches from ten different companies. We describe the role in terms of the tasks the coach has in agile projects, valuable traits, skills, tools, and the enablers of agile coaching. Our findings indicate that agile coaches perform at the team and organizational levels. They affect effort, strategies, knowledge, and skills of the agile teams. The most essential traits of an agile coach are being emphatic, people-oriented, able to listen, diplomatic, and persistent. We suggest empirically based advice for agile coaching, for example companies giving their agile coaches the authority to implement the required organizational changes within and outside the teams.publishedVersio

The Agile Coach Role: Coaching for Agile Performance Impact

It is increasingly common to introduce agile coaches to help gain speed and advantage in agile companies. Following the success of Spotify, the role of the agile coach has branched out in terms of tasks and responsibilities, but little research has been conducted to examine how this role is practiced. This paper examines the role of the agile coach through 19 semi-structured interviews with agile coaches from ten different companies. We describe the role in terms of the tasks the coach has in agile projects, valuable traits, skills, tools, and the enablers of agile coaching. Our findings indicate that agile coaches perform at the team and organizational levels. They affect effort, strategies, knowledge, and skills of the agile teams. The most essential traits of an agile coach are being emphatic, people-oriented, able to listen, diplomatic, and persistent. We suggest empirically based advice for agile coaching, for example companies giving their agile coaches the authority to implement the required organizational changes within and outside the teams