Circles
Fundamental Responsibilities of every Circle
By default (if not defined otherwise through governance), every circle is semi-autonomous, which means that they serve their super-circle and deliver to their stakeholders (internal or external customers). The circle (its members) self-organizes and self-governs how they fulfill their purpose.
Being semi-autonomous is a privilege and a responsibility, being allowed to and being required to organize and take decisions, which includes:
Prioritization and Planning: Plan work according to the different inputs for prioritization and have a way to handle unplannable work. See also [Balancing and Prioritization].
Capacity Management: Manage scheduling of FTE, shifts and vacations to ensure optimal capacity to be able to deliver their planned and unplanned work.
Transparency: Ensure documentation and flow of information. We make our work, progress and results visible to those who need the information and inform affected people proactively.
Review results: Work to achieve outcomes that are effective to deliver value to our stakeholders. The circle has a way to get stakeholder (customer) feedback on provided value and how to improve - often done using a SCRUM-like workflow and review cycles.
Coordination and Communication: Manage working interfaces for the dependencies to other circles, and ensure effectiveness.
Objective Setting and Alignment: Where strategic progress is needed, define time-bound objectives (for example using OKRs) that are aligned with the circle’s purpose and higher level strategy or goals.
Clarify Responsibilities: Ensure that the responsibilities within the circle amongst its members are clear, and sub-delegate into roles to create clarity.
Delegator Dialog: Teams maintain an ongoing dialogue with their Delegator (super-circle), reviewing their domain periodically to align expectations, constraints and results based on team purpose and objectives - as does the Delegator from their side.
People Topics: Teams address personal issues internally or in collaboration with central People Operations.
Talent and Skill Management: Identify skill gaps, ensure needed training and education, and promote continuous learning to maintain proficiency.
Continuous Improvement: Conduct retros on how they account for their domain (their plan, their strategy) and these fundamental responsibilities, and implement improvements in their processes and ways of working to become more efficient and effective in delivering on their purpose.
This is a list of the most important responsibilities, there might be more. We see this as the minimum that needs to happen in all circles (roles and teams); how and to what extent depends on the purpose, size and other factors. The Delegator must not accept that one of these responsibilities isn’t addressed well enough, and would have to clarify through governance (reviewing delegation).