What are boundaries and interactions? — It's all in the exchange!

This post is the 7th in a series on agile chartering inspired by Diana Larsen and Ainsley Nies' book, Liftoff. The first three posts address artifacts related to Purpose. The next three deal with Alignment. This post is the first of the final 3 which deal with Context.

In agile chartering, Context explores how your team fits into how value gets delivered. The first sub-element under Context, Boundaries and Interactions focuses on your team and its relationship to other parts of the larger value delivery system.

The boundary in Boundaries and Interactions marks the edge where your team's work ends and other's work begins. This boundary follows from your Team Mission — that is, your team’s unique contribution to the Product Vision. Other teams will have their own Team Missions and hence their own boundaries marking the edges of their work. These edges matter most in agile chartering when they are areas of exchange.

The interactions in Boundaries and Interactions can be defined in general as a set of possible dynamics between your team and others and also at the mission test level specifying the dynamics that apply to a specific mission test. The interactions at a mission test level often start as a subset of the general set of relationships and may introduce new relationships unique to the mission test.

Boundaries and Interactions Map

A boundaries and interactions map for a can maker can be depicted as a hub and spoke diagram with the can maker at the center hub and those with whom the can maker interacts at the ends of the spokes. What is exchanged is written along the spokes.

The effectiveness and efficiency of these interactions directly impact the flow of value. Delays here reduce value and slow feedback.

How interactions play out varies. At times, people outside your core team might temporarily join your team for intense collaborative work. Likewise, some of your core team members may join others outside your team to work with them. At other times, the relationship is more transactional. In these cases, those on one side of the boundary depend on the output of those on the other side and collaboration might be limited to the specifics of the transaction. Sometimes some combination of these dynamics occurs simultaneously.

Boundaries and Interactions are inextricably connected to the Product Vision, the Team Mission and the current in-flight work — the Mission Tests. Completing a mission test is seldom the work of just your core team. Understanding how others’ work integrates with the core team’s work improves expectation setting and mission test success.