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Language for People and Groupings

Line Management

In more traditional organisations this is the direct reporting lines for an individual and although my be loosely connected by abilities it is more commonly defined by who hired whom, cost centre and business function or unit.

Talent Pools

The bring together of people that have common abilities (skills, capabilities) that require coordination and standardisation ensuring the breath, depth of knowledge and the personal development.

Similar Terms:

  • Chapters / Virtual Chapters
  • Supply / Suppliers
  • Resource pool

Ultimately this is the collection of people that provide the answer to the question

Who do I have available to do the work in my organisation

When using TeamForm we will use any of the above terms interchangeably while still meaning the same thing.

Teams

ake demands to the Talent Pools for the correct people (or resources)

Are the grouping of people commonly from across the organisation who are collaboratively responsible for the doing a of the work. They make demands to the Talent Pools for the correct people (or resources)

Ultimately this is the collection of people that provide the answer to the question

Who is doing what work in my organisation

Similar Terms:

  • Squad
  • Delivery Team

There can be many different types of teams depending on the construct of the team, I will cover some common team types below.

Team Types

To help organisation conversations and understanding more clearly what a team does, its purpose and where it fits in to the overall design of delivering outcomes it can be very useful to associate types to teams. Following are some common and well used examples:

Delivery Group

This is generally a collection of teams that work together with a common larger mission of delivering against one or more corporate goals

Similar Terms
  • Group
  • Tribe
  • Delivery Group
  • Initative Owner

Business Function

Many businesses are divided at the most senior level into areas that align to business deliverables for example some businesses see that their consumer & retail customers as serviced by a business function and there Enterprise Customers as being serviced by another business function. Others see Physical construction as a business function and Software Creation as another.

Similar Terms
  • Org Unit
  • Domain
  • Business Unit

Stream Aligned team

Continuous flow of work aligned to a business domain or organisational capability examples:

  • A single product or service
  • A single set of features
  • A single user journey

Enabling team

Support increasing the autonomy of stream-aligned teams by growing their capabilities they focus on

  • their problems first
  • Not become the solution
Similar Terms
  • CoE (Center of Expertise)

Subsystem team

Reduce the cognitive load of stream-aligned teams who are working on systems that include or use the complicated subsystem for example:

  • Video processing codec
  • Mathematical model
  • Transaction reporting system for financial services
  • Face-recognition engine

Created only when a subsystem needs mostly specialised knowledge

Platform team

enable stream-aligned teams to deliver work with substantial autonomy by treating the services they offer as products. A platform team may be a grouping that consist of the combination of several inner platform teams

Examples :

  • From provisioning a new server instance
  • To providing tools for access management and security enforcement
  • Accounting engine