Dynamic Reteaming, 2nd Edition

Appendix A. Whiteboards to Enable Open Dynamic Reteaming

I was involved in a reteaming event that impacted around 80 people. We were in the final stage of shifting a mobile-only tribe into three separate infrastructure tribes. We had a lot of discussions in our engineering and product directors forum about how to go about this large structural change and what we wanted it to look like. We had the realization that we weren’t as open as we could be about this large-scale change, and we wanted to change that. So, we chose to visualize that baseline structure on a set of whiteboards, as I had learned from Kristian Lindwall.

Visualizing the changes on the whiteboards helped us bring a greater sense of inclusion in this reteaming with all of the other people in our organization.

The following is a general guideline for how to go about visualizing reteaming changes with whiteboards, and using them as a tool in your reteaming.

Supplies and Artifacts Needed

• Whiteboards: one or more to visually represent all of your current and planned teams (we used three horizontal whiteboards on wheels in the physical space), as shown in Figure A-1. You could also do this with an online whiteboarding tool, like Miro or Mural.

• Information for the whiteboards: team names, team missions, list of people currently on each team, understanding of how many “open slots” you have for hiring (if applicable).

Figure A-1 contains an example format that you could use to illustrate the concept for one tribe. ...