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Overarching Organizational Framework

Context​

Microservices are being adopted. Each microservice is assigned to exactly one team. There is a need for global coordination.

Problem​

  • Methods like DevOps or Scrum don't suffice to coordinate the independent microservice teams
  • Information between the microservice teams and other departments as marketing or accounting is not flowing well

Solution​

Introduce a scaling organizational framework for the whole organization, for example SAFE (Scaled Agile Framework).

These kinds of frameworks support to coordinate the independent teams and organize the processes that still need central governance. However, we advise to give as much responsibilities to the microservice teams to reduce the need for central governance while preserving the alignment to a common project strategy and goal.

Such organizational frame for the necessary coordination efforts between teams. Holistic organizational frameworks including other departments like marketing or accounting into the overall process pay into the efforts of moving the business knowledge holders closer to the microservice teams. They are usually accompanied by project tracking tooling for managing tickets (e.g. Jira) that spans the whole company and serves as a common data basis for the information flow.

Such an organizational transformation is costly, especially since education programs need to established not only for people directly involved into the development, but for the whole company in order to familiarize with the new processes.

Maturity​

More data required (only 2 sources).

Sources of Evidence​

Interview A:

  • Microservices means changing the organization structure
  • Methods like DevOps and Scrum probably don't suffice
  • Need to manage many departments with multiple teams
  • Use more holistic / scaling frameworks like SAFE (Scaled Agile Framework)
    • in enterprise environment
    • also includes marketing, customer services, POs, product management, project management, release manageers, deployment, ...engineers,
    • all need to work on same data basis (Jira) as source of truth
      • replaced old techs like excel, pdfs, sent by email
    • example ticket: 2 story points from marketing, 8 from project management, ...
  • Restructuring the organization is costly (with all the coachings)
  • One scrum team per service, sync pragmatically over the scrum processes
    • scum cycles seem to not be in sync, but no problem

Interview D:

  • organizational constraints: 2 releases per year with a lock-step release
    • with bigger test teams
    • no real test environment that can be created on-demand
    • not enough meeting rooms for all teams to coordinate
  • => introduce SAFE to have a top-down centralized coordination process
    • but still ends in a release train
    • question yourself: do you really want to do microservices
      • paying the prize to operate such a landscape
      • but not getting the benefits => indendept deployments
    • can solve different non-functional requirements cheaper: 2 separated apps on the same DB