Team Directory Detailed Guide: Delivery Team Structure

What is a delivery team structure in TeamForm?

Delivery team structure is a grouping of teams that work together to deliver value, greater than the sum of its parts. Each team understands the part of the whole that they represent and have clarity on how they interact with other sibling teams. Team of Teams is another common words used to describe ‘delivery team structure’.

What are some common types of team structures?

Some common types of delivery teams are:

• customer journey (e.g. retail banking)

• colleague journey (e.g. payroll)

• channels (e.g. mobile, web etc.)

• platforms (e.g. payment processing)

A brief set of terms commonly used: Tribes, Crews, Release Trains Value Stream or Fleets.

Teams of teams can be further groups into larger portfolios aligned around a broader business, product or customer needs.

A brief set of example terms used for grouping a set of teams of teams or beyond: domains, divisions, streams or portfolios.

Depending on the size of the organisation and people involved you may end up with a number of layers of teams to better group how they are organised.

Whilst these tend to be more long lived, they are not intended to be silos and should change over time as your organisation learns and adapts to emerging opportunities.

Commonly known industry examples are:

• Spotify model - Domain > Tribe / CoE > Squad

• Domain model - Domain > Sub-Domain / CoE > Squad

• Pace model - Domain > Crew / CoE > Squad

Where should I start with my delivery team structure?

To design a delivery team structure that is relevant for your organisation, there are a few considerations you should factor to help you with the design process:

Consideration 1: Team Size

If there are too many people they may no longer feel connected around a shared mission. A common maximum size is 150 people, which draws from Robin Dunbar's research.

Consideration 2: Team type

There are many considerations around types of teams, which can be defined by: how they interact with each other, role composition, team longevity, and locality. Defining team type helps you create clarity on what the team looks like and how it supports its mission.

• Some patterns of teams based on the above: 

  • Stream aligned team, multidisciplinary working on a customer facing product (mobile app), long lived, works in the retail value stream of the organisation.

  • Enabling team focused on cloud adoption, roams around to help other teams adopt cloud technologies in a sustainable way, they are spread across many timezones and location and act as a centre of excellence.

  • Finance team composed of accountants who work across the organisation and help other teams with analytics around financial planning and analytics.

  • Project team working together for the duration of an initiative (3-6 months), after the initiative, the team disband and go back to a bench or are assigned to another initiative with a different set of people.

Consideration 3: Depth of team levels

If there are too many layers within your delivery team structure it will introduce too many control layers which prohibits fast decision making and for employees it makes it hard for them to understand the organisation structure and hence hinder their ability to find the relevant information or people across teams. At TeamForm we recommend that you create no more than 5 layers in your delivery team structures.