Introduction

“The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.” - Ronald Reagan (former US President)

Decisions to make

• Define who will lead the coordination of planning and the oversight of governance at the team-of-teams level
• Determine the core members of the program leadership team and who is a stakeholder
• Identify the roles and responsibilities of the core program leadership team members

Context

• Sometimes a program will leverage industry established roles to make up the program leadership team
  • SAFe practitioners will have RTEs, product managers, and system managers that lead the trains
  • S@S practitioners will have a scrum of scrum master and senior or chief product owner that lead all the teams
• Sometimes a program is organized around the HR reporting structure or technical component system(s), as opposed to the business authority that is directly accountable to the customer

Why we care

• Individuals must be accountable for prioritizing the work, removing impediments for the teams, and ensuring value is delivered to the business
• The program team level must be practicing agility in order to be considered agile at scale
• This leadership team should be focused on maximizing the flow of work across the collection of agile delivery teams
• Someone close to or easily accessible to the teams should have enough strategic awareness and the authority to make quick decisions for the program

The Atlassian view

• Seek to minimize the overall number of system roles in use, as a unique tooling role (e.g. Jira Align, Jira, etc) is generally not needed for each distinct process role (e.g. RTE, product manager, etc.)
• Jira Align provides insights on progress across multiple teams, meaning someone needs to regularly take action and use that information
• Access restrictions shouldn’t be imposed on system users, as this works against the goal of transparency on a program (process and trust should come before imposing tooling limitations)
• For Jira Align, the program-level users are probably the most critical roles in the entire platform (if the RTE or product manager does not use Jira Align, the adoption will be at risk)