Provisioning Host

Understanding how organizations provision development teams (i.e. provide necessary people, funding, information, facilities, resources, knowledge, skills, etc.) has been a foundational practice in our research work.

"Hosts" are everything in an organization outside and around a team. The host can provision a team or it can interrupt it.

Fast organizationsdesign the host to "provide for" when; resources, information, etc. are needed by the team to be effective.

Slow organizations have interrupting hosts that place controls on teams, limit budgets, restrict resources, information -- efficiency is consumed by a team "working around" the system (or host interrupts). These interrupts are systemic and/or situational to projects. Teams tend to absorb the cumulative affect of all of the organization's inefficiencies, which can have a significant delaying effect on development cycle time.

Product Line Managers are the first line "provisioners" to the team and can also be the first line "interrupters." Stakeholders (internal customers) and internal product lines with interdependent products can also be interrupters. Other support functions unknowingly impose significant interrupts on development teams, among the worst are legal, procurement,and human resources.

A common "interrupt" are walls around the marketing and engineering silos. They become systemic structural problems that impact the flow of information and the speed of development projects. Interrupts can also be situational, effecting just a single project. Situational problems are easier to fix. We use Force Field Analysis to identify the restraining forces (i.e. interrupts) and remove them to improve efficiency. We remove the restraining forces to improve efficiency.

The host has to be aligned to support development teams and place them in the foreground, not the background where they must navigate the "under water obstacles" submerged throughout the organization.

Links| 3.4 CREATE A FAST ORGANIZATION STRUCTURE: FAST PROVISIONING WITH MINIMUM INTERRUPTS| FAST AUTONOMOUS TEAMS