Many organizations are making the shift away from temporary project teams and towards long-lived, cross-functional teams. People are assigned to one cross-functional team for the life of the team. They work together and get better and better at doing what they do: Whether it’s building products, delivering services, or executing marketing campaigns. Each team has the skills and capabilities to perform the design, develop, test, and deploy skills for about 80% of the work. Work is pulled by the team (during quarterly or Program Increment (PI) Planning), not to individuals.

Even more benefit is realized when these teams work together with other long-lived, cross-functional teams. These teams form teams of teams, sometimes called Agile Release Trains (ARTs), tribes, flights, or simply ‘teams of teams’. ARTs align to value streams, instead of to projects, and as such, are able to manage, plan and coordinate work together. This enables cross-team dependency management, and more succinct value delivery since all work is planned and coordinated around a common goal or value stream objective. As alluded to above, this orientation around value delivery is what can effectively be called a value stream. Download to learn more.