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Control Tribe Lead - where do I best start?

Christopher McLarnon

Hello folks, I am a newly appointed Control Tribe Lead and was hoping for some helpful do's and don't's from across the community. I am an experienced Prog Mgr who is familair with daily use of KanBan Boards and Confluence, but have never been a Control Tribe Lead before. We will only be using Jira/Confluence & Big Picture initially only, and my 'tribe' are new to Scrum @ Scale.

Comments

Bill Sheboy

Hi @Christopher McLarnon -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

I have supported lean/agile teams of various types for quite a while, including many forms of applying Kanban in several domains/industries. Yet, I am unfamiliar with the term "Control Tribe Lead".

Would you please explain the term "Control Tribe Lead" and its origin and context? That may help the community provide you ideas. Thanks!

Best regards,

Bill

Anna-BigPicture

Hi @Christopher McLarnoncongratulations on your new role!

As a Control Tribe Leader, your work most likely would be helping to facilitate and coordinate work across Squads. Said that I would like to give you some tips regarding BigPicture usage since I believe the app will be of great help in your daily work. My tips should be interesting to you especially from Scrum@Scale perspective with elements of the Spotify model.

First of all, you should know that BigPicture is a very flexible solution. For example, BP has Teams type module which can be renamed with Squads, filled out with members which will constitute your Tribe. Squad compositions may change quite often but that is not a problem. In BP you can implement such changes in just a few clicks. Once you have your Tribe defined, you can use the Board type module where you will see all Squads and Sprints in one place. The list of advantages deriving from using BigPicture Board is quite long but personally, I think that the greatest advantage comes from the fact that BP Board facilitates and supports the following S@S events:

sprint planning by showing a common backlog in one place and letting all Squads participate in planning sessions from remote locations
daily scrums and scaled daily scrums where participants can spot and mark impediments, risks and update dependencies (of course, this is possible and advisable already during the planning session)
backlog management including issue management and prioritization

Additionally BigPicture, through its friendly resource management functionalities, can help with workload plans, holiday plans, absences, capacity allocation, and more. Here my advice would be don’t overcomplicate any processes around resource/ capacity management and give Squad members as much freedom as possible for example by self absence management which is possible in BP.

Like in any PM methodologies one should never forget about goal management. Meaning that each Squad member should be aware of the goals put in front of them. Here the best approach is to use a Roadmap type module where you can define goals not only per sprint but also per specific Squad. From my experience, there should be more than 1-2 goals per Squad/sprint. As always- keep it simple.

When it comes to Box type is BigPicture I would recommend you to use Agile project box type with Iterations/Sprints as sub boxes. By default, they will not be 100% aligned with Tribe/ Squad terminology but please keep in mind that it can be easily changed with the BigPicture Enterprise version.

On top of the above, it is important to remember that Squads need trust and transparency. If they prefer to work on a daily basis with Jira, that is all right, let them do that. But whenever cooperation and coordination from a higher level is needed then BigPicture seems to be the best solution.