Matthew Skelton

Collaboration: working closely together with another team
X-as-a-Service: consuming or providing something with minimal collaboration
Facilitating: helping (or being helped by) another team to clear impediments

This collaboration occurs between groups with different skill sets in order to bring together the combined knowledge and experience of many people to solve challenging problems

with a small defined overlap, and with a full overlap of focus and responsibilities—the two teams must take on joint responsibility for the overall outcomes of their collaboration, because the act of collaborating creates a blurring of responsibility boundaries. Without joint responsibility, there is a danger of loss of trust if something goes wrong

Care must be taken to not let the number of people exceed Dunbar’s number of fifteen

when two teams are interacting using the collaboration mode, there should be a high value gained from working together due to the high cost of collaboration; the reward needs to be tangible

Constraint: A team should use collaboration mode with, at most, one other team at a time

The X-as-a-Service team interaction mode is suited to situations where there is a need for one or more teams to use a code library, component, API, or platform that “just works” without much effort, where a component or aspect of the system can be effectively provided “as a service” by a distinct team or group of teams

Relying on something “as a service” requires excellent work from the XaaS team(s)—not easy to achieve—but results in the delivery team having to understand less about non-core aspects of their work, allowing them to deliver more quickly

X-as-a-Service model, there should be a high value gained from some teams being able to ignore low-level details of the service that they consume from another team, allowing them to move quickly without needing to be concerned with implementation details

The X-as-a-Service model works well only if the service boundary is well chosen and well implemented, with a good service-management practice from the team providing the service