Horizontal Scaling with Turfs
Auhor: Jurgen Appelo
You can scale a small unit to multiple teams without adding a management layer by using the Turf Types patterns: Teams of Teams, Product Areas, Business Units, and Houses. Any of the four Turf Types mentioned in this pattern set may help grow your Base while your Crews remain small.
Sometimes, a set of responsibilities is larger than one team can handle but not necessarily large enough to be defined at the level of the Base. Sometimes, an area of responsibility can be pushed out of a management team (Governance Crew), but it cannot be given to just one Crew because it covers and concerns multiple of them. In such cases, a Turf could be an excellent option to consider.
The Turf is an area cultivated and protected by the same people. It could be a production area, a couple of machines, a database/repository, a specific business model, or a town district that a group of people collectively takes care of.
For a fire department, it could be their building and their trucks. For an airline, it could be several airplanes of the same type. For a software team, it would be the codebase and technology stack. And for a pair of public speakers, it might be their stories and earlier presentations. These are examples of areas of responsibility that must be put to good use for great customer and user experiences while requiring upgrades, maintenance, and protection from risks and dangers.
“We usually build things we’ve never built before. Each project is a wild territory that we have to walk through before we can draw a map. By digging into the work, we figure out where the interdependencies are, how things are connected, and what we can slice apart.” - Shape Up: Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters - Ryan Singer.
No (Traditional) Management
It is essential to understand that Turfs do not get a traditional manager assigned to them. The Turfs are self-managing and should not be turned into silos or management territories. Instead, we prefer to keep traditional management in the Governance Crew and outside of all Turfs.
When a Base grows so large that the number of people in it cannot be managed anymore by one Governance Crew, the best step is to split the Base (horizontally). We do not add a management layer inside the Base (vertically). That’s not what Turfs are for.
Turf Size
If the Turf that a group of people is responsible for gets too large, they will struggle to maintain it. We may call this “maintenance drag”. People won’t be able to keep up fixing all the problems caused by environmental changes, which will slow them down.
Another issue to consider is cognitive load. When the Turf is too large, the amount of knowledge people need to keep in their heads also gets too large. The result is that they start swapping knowledge in and out of their heads. They waste time relearning things they have forgotten, which also slows them down.
A typical Turf Size would probably be anywhere between ten to fifty people. Any smaller and it would be the same as one Crew. Any larger and it would become equivalent to the Base.
Reteaming
The Turf concept plays a vital role in the case of reteaming. When Crews reorganize themselves within one territory, there is little impact on their productivity because they are all supposed to be familiar with the entire area. However, when Crews reteam across different territories, they probably must expect a drop in velocity and throughput. In the former case, the change in cognitive load will have no impact; in the latter case, it will.
In other words, when you set up a Team of Teams within a Base, your Mission Teams, Dynamic Teams, and/or Liquid Teams inside it can reteam fast and frequently with little overhead. You may still implement reteaming without a Team of Teams as a Turf, but it should be slow and infrequent.
With either of the four patterns in the Turf Types set (or a combination of them, you create an organizing layer between the Crews and the Base without traditional managers. We see that as horizontal rather than vertical scaling.
