Introduction

"When you’re surrounded by people who share a passionate commitment around a common purpose, anything is possible." - Howard Schultz (Starbucks)

Decisions to make

• Define the business's big-picture organizational value stream
• Identify the program purpose in relation to that value stream
• Specify what value the program delivers and to whom
• Determine the scope of work for one program in relation to others
• Establish which teams must plan and execute together in order to effectively deliver value
• Determine which teams must comprise that program

Context

• Sometimes understanding how different agile scaling frameworks think of a program is useful
  • Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe): a program is usually equal to an Agile Release Train (ART)
  • S@S or Enterprise Scrum: a program is usually equal to the teams at the Scrum Of Scrum level
  • LESS: a program is usually equal to a Product Group organized around customer value delivery
  • Spotify: a program is usually equal to the tribe
  • DAD: a program is usually equal to an organizational construct (including HR organizational structure)
  • APM (Agile Portfolio Management): a program is usually directly translatable per investment and cost accounting consideration
• Sometimes a program will select a scaling framework to use, but remember, practicing a framework or is only part of the journey
• Sometimes a program finds it helpful to have representation from the agile practice or transformation office in the discovery phase
• Sometimes identifying all the teams that should participate in the program will encourage better collaboration between teams
• Sometimes having a general awareness of the desired Jira Align use cases and the way information is filtered by a program enables better decision making

Why we care

• Planning together, at a regular cadence and across teams, are defining characteristics of agile at scale
• How well the program’s teams are structured impacts the ability to deliver together
• Understanding the boundaries between programs ensures that ownership and accountability can be felt by the teams
• We want to unleash the power of every team by making the important planning and monitoring decisions visible
• If teams do not need to plan and deliver together then do not burden them with more meetings and process

The Atlassian view

• Programs are essentially groupings of people and related teams that need to coordinate planning and delivery activities
• The concept of a program can translate in various ways depending on the agile at scale framework in practice at your organization (e.g. SAFe, Scrum@Scale, LeSS, etc.), but all paths lead back to the idea of a “team of teams”
• Many critical Jira Align features, such as the program room and program board, are tied to the program-level filters that make them accessible only to teams defined as program teams
• Teams making up a program should share a collective feature backlog, meaning features belong to the program and not any particular team
  • Some teams may work exclusively on a feature, but ownership belongs to the program