<aside> <img src="/icons/list-indent_gray.svg" alt="/icons/list-indent_gray.svg" width="40px" /> Introduction to SIS
Stream Iteration Sync (SIS) fills the gap between company strategy and team tactics.
SiS is a way to improve learning and delivery across multiple teams, optimising in quick iterations. It combines models, practices and an event (called a Sync Event) which forms the heartbeat of cross-team collaboration. It isn’t a ready-made recipe: you will have to design your own SIS implementation as a series of experiments.
SiS was created by a group of coaches and program managers who needed a solution but were not prepared to inflict standard framework bullshit on their teams.
<aside> ⚠️ SIS is simply a synchronisation tool. It does not mandate any specific organisational structure, or governance, or planning practice. However, through the SIS models, and the structured discussions around those, you should be able to understand better your environment and improve it.
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The objective is to maximise the overall value stream effectiveness, finding the right balance between team focus and cross-team collaboration. This balance will change from context to context, and with time. As such, SIS is designed to be adaptive and you will need to tweak your SIS iteratively.
SIS does not change anything in the organisation and is designed to require minimal effort to get started: a shared board, a few planning meetings and a 2-hours Sync Event are enough. It’s a safe-to-fail experiment with potentially high rewards.
SIS is unashamedly biased towards giving teams everything they need to make the whole value stream successful.
SIS is especially useful when multiple teams are working together towards the same closely aligned goals, as often happens in a value stream. All teams in such a scenario are highly correlated making it relatively easy to identify the nature of any dependencies.
So far, we have applied SiS between 3 to 11 teams, 30 to 90 people. Always in complex R&D environments.
SIS can be extended, carefully, to multiple value streams or even company-wide.
SIS is not meant to be a pastry recipe because contexts are too different for standard or precisely defined solutions to work across multiple situations.
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