Book review: Dynamic reteaming (Helfand)

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I was very much looking forward to this book as it was perfect timing for me, planning a big reteaming but stuck and solely focused on the Team topologies concept. But i was to be disappointed as it brought nothing new to the table except branding the different patterns.

  1. One by one
  2. Grow and split
  3. Isolation
  4. Merging
  5. Switching

Or as Helfand says

Dynamic Reteaming is team change. Teams evolve and change structurally according to 5 base patterns: one by one, grow and split, isolation, merging and switching. These changes happen at different levels: individual, team, team of teams, department, company, industry and beyond.

After skimming (not reading) through the book i saw the forewords and understood that the whole book was based on interviews and no own experience, except being a part of some startups. If you like great stories from other startups i recommend this book as inspiration. But if you are a non-US citizen working in a big company this is crap. So i actually did not read the book except for the last chapter that had some great tools for reteaming i did not know about.

On this topic i can offer a true story of mine that we did in a big Swedish company:

The old family company Fritidsresor was aquired by the German global tour operator TUI in 2016. At this time was working for the PMO and when a job opportunity popped up (without any ad) to become a part of the new ”hub-team”, responsible for all web development in TUI, me and some of my friends from Fritidsresor volunteered. We went on stealth mode as we did’nt want the Union to stop us and my role was to format this as a crossfunctional team with a new office, separated from the legacy. I found a empty office nearby and recruited people that had not voulunteered. Just like a startup we established this hub and it was very easy with this isolation pattern compared to similar efforts trying to grow and split.

I left TUI 2017 as the culture was totally destroyed by tearing down the wonderful people and culture department by merging it into TUI HR and introducing activity based spaces instead of team spaces. I wonder how they are doing today?

Score (5 max)

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