Value Stream Crew
Crew Type
A Value Stream Crew has end-to-end responsibility for a value stream.
Crew Types: Governance Crew • Value Stream Crew • Facilitation Crew • Capability Crew • Platform Crew • Experience Crew • Partnership Crew
Purpose
A Value Stream Crew has end-to-end responsibility for a value stream. Its members are responsible for everything, from the moment they receive a customer (user) request to the moment they deliver value to the customer (user).
Value delivery can involve regular product releases or service upgrades as the value stream is typically either a product or a service. In general, your Value Stream Crews applies lean and agile practices, or methods such as Kanban and Scrum, to manage the continuous delivery of value. Process details are a matter for the Crews themselves, but your Governance Crew or a Forum can offer some guidance or even set constraints.
The goal of end-to-end responsibility for a value stream is that there are no handovers of work items between teams, which otherwise could make a business incredibly slow to respond to change. All that is needed for a Crew to deliver value should be within their span of control. For sure, there might be dependencies on other teams but negotiating or breaking these dependencies is within the power of the Crew itself.
Notes
In the case of large products, the value stream of a Crew could be one specific Job-to-Be-Done, feature set, or customer domain out of many. In such cases, you should probably set up Facilitation Crews to coordinate the work between the multiple value streams. Examples would be crews of product owners, agile coaches, or technical leads. Representatives from each Value Stream Crew would then work together to resolve bottlenecks and address their dependencies.
Many authors wrote entire books on how Value Stream Crews can organize their work, and we gladly defer to the available literature on these matters. In the most agile and versatile organizations, the majority of Crews will be Value Stream Crews
Rules / Constraints
The Value Stream Crew has full responsibility for a value stream.
There are no handovers of work between/to other Crews.
The Value Stream Crew has all the skills to get their essential work done.
“Cooperation is the thorough conviction that nobody can get there unless everybody gets there.”
(Source: Virginia Burden)
Improving the company organization design of epharma by using unFIX - structure with 18 bases, organized one unFIX congress and five domains.