The importance of Meeting them Where they Are

As I work with teams, leaders, or executives when applying Agile, often times what they ask for is not the first thing they need.  This is why bringing a “meet them where they are” mindset is important.  When you meet them where they are, you can bring the kind of coaching, education, and feedback that better fits their role and experience.

In most cases “meeting them where they are” means to understand where mentally (both intellectually and emotionally) they are in relation to the topic, in this case Agile.  This may mean attempting to understand their level of Agile knowledge, experience with Agile, and motivation or willingness for Agile. Sometimes meeting them where they are is physical meaning you join them in their workplace, their daily stand-up, or any space you may observe their interactions to better understand where they are.

This approach can help you understand the common ground. This helps the Agile coach know where they are and where they can go from there. It helps a coach determine how to engage in a way that is sensible and motivating to those they are coaching.  Example of meeting them where they are include:

- If a team has only just begun to form, it may be better to educate them on what it means to be a team, the Tuckman model, and on what it means to form before you expect them to perform well. 

- If a new team wants to give and receive honest feedback to each other, it may be better to first initiate icebreakers and connecting activities so that team members can get to know one another and build psychological safety and trust first.

- If a team or company wants to embark on an Agile journey, before you educate the team on how to do Scrum it may be better to first start with a discovery activity to gauge the current knowledge of Agile, Agile experience, and willingness to apply Agile.  This can help you better adapt the level of Scrum education they need.

- If you learn that the team is fairly Agile savvy and have applied Scrum already, but are having challenges with decomposing work, then you can meet them where they are but experimenting with story mapping.

Meeting them where they are has multiple advantages but the primary one is that you can determine what they need first.  When you meet them where they are, you can bring the kind of coaching, education, and feedback that better fits their knowledge, experience, and willingness.

Top 5 ways to adapt your Agile Enterprise for a better Year ahead!

A New Year is upon us!  What is in store for 2018?  Better yet, what changes might you apply for a better Agile transformation and better business outcomes?  Here are a few to consider.

1) Focus more (much more) on the Agile mindset and the Agile values and principles.  Without this, people aren’t quite sure whey they are implementing the Agile mechanics (practices and tools).  Ask your employees if they know why they are applying the Agile methods and practices.  If they don’t really know, more strongly relate them to the Agile values and principles. 

2) Place Coaches high enough in to make a difference.  Placing them too low in an organization will give them little or no influence to change anything that matters.  Gauge your current placement of Agile Coaches and determine if they have the right access and influence to leadership.

3) Ensure leaders in your organization are educated in Agile.  Provide a combination of the Agile values and principles and Agile concepts, mindset, and practices that will help them support and lead an Agile transformation.  This includes understanding and establishing a high performing Agile workplace.

4) Focus on the employee side of Agile and what it takes to build a high performing team.  This includes establishing psychological safety, demonstrating servant leadership, creating a culture of self-organizing teams and even self-management, introducing continuous peer-to-peer feedback loops, and more. 

5) Become totally customer-value driven. Stop doing Agile for Agile’s sake and focus on the customer benefits.  Bring a customer mindset to Agile.  This means more closely identify with your customers (e.g., personas) and capture and apply more customer feedback along the way. 

I will go so far to say if you don't do anything else this year but these, you will have a stronger Agile enterprise that brings you more aligned with building high value products and services.  Give them a try!

Learn more by reading The Agile Enterprise.   

A great Agile book - Being Agile: Your Roadmap to a Successful Adoption of Agile

Being Agile is your roadmap to successfully transforming to an Agile culture. In this unique book, veteran Agile Coach Mario Moreira advises new and current adopters how to implement a robust Agile framework that emphasizes Agile values and principles over the mechanical elements. This book focuses on the business benefit of implementing Agile which focuses on delivering customer value and having a positive impact on revenue. 

This book begins by explaining that in order to truly cross the Agile chasm, there must be a transformation to the Agile culture that focuses on delivering customer value.  Mario shows maturing early adopters how to bridge the chasm between going through the motions of “doing Agile” and genuinely “being Agile.” 

It then delves into the business benefits of Agile and the often missing discussion that Agile supplements your strategy to help your business succeed.  The book highlights the important objectives of customer and employees matter, another area that often is underserved.  It briefly discussions some of the methodologies (including Scrum, Kanban, DSDM, Lean, VFQ, and XP), and the roles a team and organization can play within an Agile context. 

After a high-level synopsis of Agile, Mario reminds us that Agile is nothing more and nothing less than a set of values and principles.  This book delves deeply into a focus on the Agile values and principles.  This book dissects each value and principle that conveys whether they are really exhibited within a culture.  These values and principles must be observed, believed, and translated into actions as an important to precipitate a cultural shift. The book emphasizes the importance of keeping the values and principles always in mind.

The author then plunges into the nitty-gritty of the deploying Agile in a manner that will better achieve an Agile transformation.  He does this by introducing the reader to the Ready, Implement, Coach, and Hone (RICH) Deployment model.  The rubric of readiness engages and begins conditioning the mind toward the Agile mindset as well as focusing on the areas that need to be considered as you are embarking on your Agile journey.  He asks you to consider such factors as:

·         Evaluating team candidates for skills, behavior, and willingness 

·         Assessing Stakeholder buy-in and engagement

·         Determining Suitability for applying Agile

·         Identifying measures to see if you are Agile and if you are deriving the business benefits

·         Establishing a customer validation vision to engage in the critical customer feedback

·         Implementing Agile roles and identifying those best for these roles

·         Establishing an adaptable and scalable Agile framework

·         Determining your User story writing and grooming approach

·         Understanding story points for sizing and establishing a relative sizing framework

·         Establishing Educational needs and building an Agile community

·         Constructing Done criteria and how it helps with quality

Implement focuses on the timely application of agile elements within a team or organization while still maintaining emphasis on the Agile values and principles. Coach focuses on on-boarding teams, coaching teams and management through initial implementation, grooming in-house talent, ensuring Agile values and principles are a focus, while acting as a navigator on the path to Agility. Hone emphasizes the inspect-and-adapt model where periodically the current state is reflected upon and opportunities for improvement identified and acted upon.

This book is geared toward Agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, Product Owners, Team members, product managers, project managers, middle, senior, and executive management in software engineering and development divisions and enterprises.  Learning opportunities include:

·         Comprehending Agile values and principles with an in-depth discussion on each principle and how they may be exemplified within an Agile culture.

·         Advocating a framework in which values, customer engagement, employee engagement, and an Agile framework can lead to an increase in sales and productivity, incorporated in the Agile Value to Incentive Differentiator (AVID) framework.

·         Presenting a methodical yet adaptable approach toward Agile transformation, encapsulated in a Ready–Implement–Coach–Hone (RICH) deployment model that can help establish an adaptable roadmap toward your Agile destination.   

·         Introducing the importance of an Agile Customer Validation Vision that emphasizes a disciplined approach to engaging customers and gaining their valuable customer feedback

·         Providing a mechanism for evaluating your level of alignment to the Agile values and principles, encapsulated in the Agile Mindset Values and Principles (Agile MVP) Advisor.

·         Promoting a special focus on value-added work (VAW) that features customer work as valuable and an accompanying value capture metric.

·         Introducing Gamification concepts to engage and motivate employees toward Agile behaviors with the goal of achieving an Agile transformation

·         Advocating a change in your IT governance toward collaborative governance and performance review process places a focus on team rewards. 

This book ends with three case studies—stories of a smaller colocated project, a medium distributed project, and a large distributed team—to help you understand how the readiness activities, deployment approach, and commitment to Agile lead to different results. This book can help you focus on truly “being Agile” and gain the business benefits of doing so.  What will your case study look like?  Let this material in Being Agile help you achieve a successful one.

Benefits of Agile Coaches for your Agile Transformation

Many companies begin their introduction to Agile by trying it on a project or two.  If they believe they have ‘enough’ success with Agile, then typically more projects deploy Agile.  The challenge is that at some point the company is unclear on what level of Agile deployment has occurred and what type of Agile is really being adopted.  Senior Management may hear things like “we are Agile” and not really sure what that means.  Worse yet, because of the inconsistency of understanding Agile, some teams will say things like, “we don’t need to document anything because we are Agile”, other teams will say “we don’t need any management support because we are self-organized”, while others will say “we can’t tell you what we’re building until the end of the project because we are using Agile”.  Now what do you do? 

This becomes even more challenging when the company begins to realize the amount of effort they are haphazardly spending on Agile adoption.  Sometimes the company learns that they are spending twice for the same thing like training and/or tools and often overspending because they are not leveraging the volume discount strength of the whole company.  This is particularly relevant to medium and large companies.  

Whether you realize it or not, when you have multiple teams heading in roughly the same Agile direction, you have already embarked on an Agile transformation.  So the question is, do you want to let the change occur in an unorganized and ad hoc manner or do you want to manage that change in an organized way and gleam the most benefit from the effort.

I do not believe there should be a prescriptive way to deploy Agile.  However, there needs to be some way to ensure the teams are working on the highest customer value work. An enterprise level approach can help.  This ensures that the company reduces the muda (a.k.a., waste), leverages and reuses what it can, and ensures all teams are building the highest customer value work.      

When you find yourself in the situation where there are many in your company wanting to adopt a certain tool, process, method, and/or culture, or if it is already happening in an ad-hoc manner, it is highly recommended to initiate an organized approach to the enterprise change.  In Michael Spayd’s “Evolving Agile in the Enterprise: Implementing XP on a Grand Scale”, he recommends that an “effective Change team” is established.  In my experience, seasoned Agile Coaches and/or an Agile enterprise leadership team provides significant leadership for the change effort.  The Agile Coaches/Agile leadership team (aka, change team) provides the framework for the enterprise but still allows for adaptability and decision-points by the teams so they feel ownership of their working process.

The Agile enterprise leadership team should include talent that has experience in Agile enterprise change such as seasoned Agile Coaches and those who have organizational level change experience.  Some members can be matrix-ed in from internal organizations.  They should function as a team and can be distributed according to the areas within the organization that they will support.   It is often best to bring in either full-time regular talent or external long-term consultants to ensure that they don’t just make recommendations, but live through the challenges of the change as they help product teams, senior management, and others.

What are some of the benefits of Agile coaches and/or Agile enterprise leadership team?  This leadership can help you establish and manage the following: 

• Agile Vision - create a vision for where you can go.  A strong Agile coach has been to where you want to go. Without this experience, a company may never get there.  This may include a focus on the Customer to build the right thing and on the Employees to build the thing right" or similar.  By having a central Agile leadership team to focus you, you can better gain buy-in or at least get folks to understand why you are going in this direction.   
• Agile Transformation Roadmap - identify common activities to help a product team come up to speed with Agile.  This includes establishing a set of “ready for deployment” materials to help teams get ready for the change to Agile.  By having Agile Coaches help you, it will save time and effort from each product team having to figure out the adoption activities themselves
• Agile framework and practices - collaboratively establish an adaptable set of Agile methods and practices with the rest of the organization.  By having central Agile leadership coordinate this, it will save time and effort from each product team having to establish Agile methods and practices, although they will need to tailor them for their specific team. 
• Agile terminology – establish a common working language for Agile so that members from across the organization can communicate and interact effectively with each other.  By having central Agile leadership establish this, this reduces the miscommunication issues that will arise across the organization regarding various and sundry definitions of Agile terminology.   
• Agile training – establish a common set of Agile Training aimed at various levels of the organization (e.g., Scrum Team, Scrum Masters,  Product Owner, Middle Mgt, Senior Mgt).  By using a managed training deployment approach via the central Agile leadership team and education group, we will have consistent training and can get a better understanding of who has and hasn’t been trained.  By providing an in-house training approach, this reduces the cost of utilizing multiple vendors.  This increases common Agile understanding across the organization and product teams.
• Agile Communities – establish a common organizational Agile website with links to internal and external Agile communities.  Having the central Agile leadership team establish and support this, ensure that there is a managed approached to sharing online Agile related information and resources (framework, practices, etc.) across the company site that is kept up-to-date.    
• Agile Coaching - A key aspect of the leadership team is to provide Agile Coaching via the Agile leadership team to projects/product teams across the enterprise.  They may start with a small core of dedicated Agile Coaches and then can leverage existing Agile talent across the enterprise in establishing an Agile Coaching Circle.  Coaching significantly reduces the effort involved with “correctly” getting a team to adopt Agile and more importantly ensures they do not regress into their old traditional habits. 
• Agile Adoption measures – establish a common and reasonable set of adoption measures to see what progress is being made in the Agile adoption within the company.  By having the Agile leadership team manage this, we have common adoption measures to ensure that the leadership team and product teams are meeting the organization objectives for Agile adoption.  Senior management can more readily get a pulse of the Agile status across the organization.
• Agile Challenges Point of Contact (PoC) – establish a central point to manage Agile related challenges and issues.  This would include website, email PoC and the establishment of an Agile FAQ.  The benefit to having a go-to centralized Agile leadership team to manage this is that they can both become aware of these issues and then resolve the issues and challenges before they cause an impact.
• Agile Vendor Liaison PoC – utilize the Agile leadership team to become the PoC for managing the company relationships with the various Agile vendors.  By using a central Agile leadership team ensures that the organization or company is gaining the most leverage from the volume discounts and negotiations for Agile related materials and tools.  

Finally, when employees within a company see that many are going Agile, sometimes it is comforting to see that the organization is providing support in the adoption effort.  It is even more comforting when those employees that haven’t yet gone Agile see that there is ready support for their deployment.   It is particularly problematic when the employees are seeing wide variations of “agile” being deployed some of which is not really Agile, and they wonder when the organization may provide some guidance in this matter.  Introducing Agile really is a culture shift.  If you are thinking about adopting it or already are, then it can be a benefit to have Agile Coaches and/or a centralized Agile leadership team to help you navigate to a success adoption of Agile.  

Good luck on your Agile adventure!

Note: this was originally written in 2008 with minor updates in 2012.    

The Importance of Language in a move to an Agile Culture (with Polling Results)

In my experience in helping teams transform toward an Agile culture, moving away from the traditional terminology and adapting Agile terminology is very beneficial.  At the same time, I have sensed reluctance in organizations in removing from their traditional language.  I believe the language you use matters a great deal if you are attempting to achieve a certain culture.  A prime example is moving from the language of certainty in a more big-upfront Waterfall culture to discovery and hypothesis driven language in an incremental Agile culture.

If you are trying to change culture, the change in language highlights that something has changed and provides folks with a learning opportunity assuming that there is true meaning behind the language and a commitment to change. It makes everyone pay more attention. If you think about it, when you travel from one culture to another, the language does indeed change.  Using the proper language helps you inform and communicate needs more effectively while a common language provides a bond within our community.

Maybe the key is to use language that is most efficient and effective for the culture you want to get to. If you want to change your culture, you need to ensure that the language is not tripping you up and dragging along its baggage of prior meaning.  When you move from a big-upfront Waterfall to an incremental Agile culture, using the same waterfall language will trip you up.

Why? Because people in the organization still think the definition of the term is stemming from the 'old' culture. Attempting to change culture is hard enough and when you have language from the old culture still around, you can be sure that those people within the org are still interpreting the language using the old world context. This can impact your success to advance your new culture. 

With all of that being said, this is the opinion of one person.  So what of the opinions’ of others?  With that in mind, I embarked on a poll via LinkedIn to gauge other’s thoughts on how important is it to use Agile terminology to get to an Agile culture.  I present you with the following results:

Within a period of a month, there were 83 votes cast along with 26 comments.  The poll results revealed that 65% percent (or close to two-thirds) of the participants felt the use of Agile terminology was either ‘Very Important’ or ‘Important’ for an Agile culture.  Another 12% felt it were neutral.  The remaining 23% felt that the use of Agile terminology was of ‘Little Importance’ or ‘Not important at all’.

In order to more fully understand other opinions, I have included a paraphrasing of some of the comments.  They include: there is a need for specialized vocabulary; there are fundamental differences amongst various practices and methods so terminology should be considered; the terminology contributes to language precision; and the words used should work for the culture.  You can see one of the threads within the “Agile” Linkedin group for specific comments from others.

Some took my examples literally.  I didn’t really mean to imply that the term ‘sprint’ and ‘phase’ are the same, but I have seen teams use those terms interchangeably.  So I do agree that one term is not necessarily better than another but that you should ensure the language you use does not get in the way of learning and advancing within your culture.   Also, I’m not clear that there needs to be a standard “Agile” terminology across the industry.  However, with that said, if you are applying Scrum, you should use Scrum terminology (and the same for XP, Kanban, etc). There is a value of having a common Agile terminology within an organization so that there can be a more effective platform for Agile related discussion across teams.  

Also a few people mentioned that the meaning is more important than terminology.  I do favor this line of thinking because there should be an effective meaning behind all terminology used.  Terminology without meaning is babble.  So yes, it is important, dare I say critical to have a well understood and clear meaning behind all the terminology used in order to gain an effective Agile culture. 

Ultimately if you are truly trying to initiate a culture change, then the language should reflect the change you are looking to make.   In this case, if want to establish an Agile culture, utilize the terminology that provides an appropriate and clear meaning which drags little or no baggage.  This will help you get to the Agile culture you may be seeking.  Cheers!

Note: another article that discusses Agile terminology focusing on the terms 'size' vs 'estimate' may be found at: http://cmforagile.blogspot.com/2012/10/size-matters-using-size-instead-of.html

Size Matters – using “size” instead of “estimate” on Agile projects

When I help teams implement Agile methods, I find that some folks have a hard time getting their head around “estimating” user stories (aka, requirements) using story points. When I get to the discussion of Sprint Planning where we are scrubbing stories (aka, requirements) as a team, I used to say it is now time to “estimate user stories”. I would emphasize the importance of having the whole team estimate the story together. I also tend to apply the planning poker technique where each team member has a physical or virtual set of cards with the Fibonacci sequence (aka, law of distribution) of numbers on them (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, etc.). When it is time to estimate the user story, each team member selects a card from their deck relating to the story points they think reflects their estimate of the work which should include their notion of complexity and risk for that story.

When I educate folks on estimating user stories, some folks ask me to align the story point with days or hours. That’s when it occurred to me… I realized that when I use the word “estimate” it would make some (many?) folks think of the traditional estimation that uses “schedule” as a measure (e.g., hours, days, weeks, months, years). However, in Agile the intent is to size the amount of work based on the functionality you are building for that story. So in effect in Agile, “scope” is the measure of progress. This is when I realized that folks were often trying to apply a schedule measure because of their familiarity with traditional estimation when in fact, story points is meant to represent the size of the functionality we are building or the scope of the work including the amount of work + complexity + risk of that work. In other words, it was like comparing apples and oranges.

With this in mind, I strongly advocate that in Agile it is much more meaningful and appropriate to use the term “size” as the verb to measure the user stories since this relates to the amount of functionality you are building. This is more than just semantics. This takes us a step away from the traditional mindset where schedule is “king” and moves us to the more important focus of scope since to our customers, the functionality is what is valuable. Now make no mistake, there will be trades offs between schedule and scope, but working software that meets customer needs and provides them value is IMHO slightly more important (e.g., working software over schedule).

It is also important to note that a team’s sprint velocity is a representation of how much functionality can be delivered within a sprint. This is yet another reason why I encourage you to use the term “size” since sizing individual stories relates to the functionality you are building and the sprint velocity relates to how much total functionality is delivered in a sprint.

So if you are having trouble understanding or explaining the concept of estimating user stories, think in terms of the scope of functionality and consider using the term “size” instead of “estimation” to break from the traditional mindset of schedule. So maybe size does matter after all…

Robust Agile Organization - Core Roles and Beyond!

To establish to a fully robust Agile enterprise, it is important for everyone to play a role in Agile. I have found that being successful from an Agile perspective requires "core" roles and but must include the "across the enterprise" roles to ensure success.  Let's focus on each of these areas.

Core   

The core roles provide the nucleus for building customer value.  This starts with the Development Team. I prefer to use the term Agile Team (or something similar) since I want to ensure folks understand that it is not just development-centric but includes other key cross-functional roles and disciplines.  This cross-functional team is made up of around 7-9 members who can architect, design, develop, build, technically write, and test. This is commonly made up of developers (who can architect, design, and code, but preferably some who can do all three), QA/testers (who can build and execute tests), UX, DB, tech writers, and CM/build talent. The key is to ensure you have all of the roles you need to build an idea with sufficient skills to get the job done. You may also need a Product Architect which is a role that may not be considered full-time because they can support more than one team related to an idea.  However, it should be committed to the team(s).  This person ensures that the architectural related decisions are established and discussed with the team.

The servant leader for the team is the Scrum Master. The Scrum Master educates the team on Agile processes and practices, and helps them apply those practices. The Scrum Master takes the responsibility of a team coach ensuring the team stays true to the Agile values and principles as articulated in the Agile Manifesto including applying self-organization around the work. The Scrum Master helps the Agile Team and Product Owner remove roadblocks. This role also facilitates the Sprint Planning session, Daily Stand-ups, Retrospectives, and the Agile Release Planning session. Learn more about the Scrum Master in the Who makes the Best Scrum Master article.

Equally important is the role of Product Owner (PO), the driver of customer value. This Agile role should be played by someone within each product team that is customer facing to ensure everyone understands customer needs. This is often played by the Product Manager, Business Analyst, or someone who provides the business perspective and engages with customers to ensure the Agile Team is building something that is of value to the customer. Identifying the right customers for validation is the job of the Product Owner. To scale this PO role, the lead PO may introduce Product Owner Proxies (POP) who may be architectures, lead developers, or functional managers (the latter role may now have much less to do). The POP takes direction from the lead PO via the Product Owner Scrum of Scrum sessions to ensure all POs and POPs are on the same page. Then it is important to bring the customer into the picture to validate that what the team is building is something that the customer actually wants.  Learn more about the PO in the Who makes the Best PO article.

The final core role that is often forgotten in many Agile environments is the Customer.  The customer is core to determining what is value.  With the customer, you are not really enacting Agile. The customer is where many of the ideas of value come from.  The customer provides the valuable feedback along the way that validates (or adapts) what is considered value.  The customer may be in the form of multiple personas depending on their motivations and pain points. 

Across the Enterprise (aka, Beyond) 

If this is your first foray into the Agile space or you want advance in your state of Agile, it is important to have an Agile Coach who possesses deep Agile deployment knowledge to ensure teams are implementing Agile effectively. It has been established that training will only provide initial knowledge but team members can easily revert back to old traditional habits. The Agile Coach understands both the short-term and long-term pitfalls of adopting Agile, that Agile is a culture shift and will take time, and can help the team move to Agile is a more effective and efficient manner.

We then turn to management. Middle Management must play their role where they gently back away from command-and-control and act more as servant-leaders where they trust their teams, help them remove roadblocks, and support the Agile practices. They must realize that their direct reports are now on Agile Teams so they cannot be assigned any additional work. They may attend the End-of-Sprint Review (aka, demo) to gain a more genuine sense of progress (seeing actual working functionality) vs. getting a status report. Often times middle management have less to do in an Agile world and may consider changing their roles to either more of a Resource Management or Product Owner Proxy.  Learn more about Agile and middle management by visiting the Agile and Middle Management article.

Executives/Senior Management needs to play a leadership role as Agile champion. They must support Agile and understand that its primary intent is to build customer value which can ultimately mean more revenue for the company. They must also understand that they must get the Agile teams to feel ownership of their work and this requires leadership and not command-and-control style managers. They may need to adjust their staff if it already laden with too much command-and-control. They may also attend the End-of-Sprint Review (aka, demo) to gain a more genuine sense of progress (seeing actual working functionality).  Learn more about Agile and the Executive role by visiting the Agile Executives Playbook article.

Then we bring in roles like Sales and Marketing, Finance, and HR. These roles should adapt toward the same concepts of agile leadership, self-organizing teams, collaboration, streamlining and eliminating waste. Sales and Marketing are involved with bringing a product to market. They need to help the Product Owner with requirements input and clarification to ensure we are building something the customer needs. They need to understand that the Product Backlog and Release Goals are owned by the Product Owner, they must funnel requirements to the Product Owner, and avoid making commitments without the Product Owner in agreement.

Finance needs to be flexible in understanding that they can still manage to cost because it is the scope that is the important variable.  Finance and Portfolio should adapt to a continuous budgeting approach where ideas are continuously added to an enterprise kanban prioritized by value instead of fixing the work at the beginning of an annual budgeting process. You can learn more in the book Beyond Budgeting. 

If performance objectives are part of the organizational processes, then it is important for HR to establish a performance process that allows for team goals. This is because as part of the Agile mindset, it is important to establish that it is the team’s responsibility to ensure the release is a success and not specific to individuals.  HR can also help the enterprise move from an annual performance review to continuous review and feedback. Learn more about this in the Agile is creating a new horizon for HR article. 

If an idea or product is made up of more than one Agile Team (e.g., for a team of twenty you would want to break them into three teams of around 7), then there may be a need for an Agile Project Manager (APM) to help manage the dependencies and risks across teams, remove roadblocks, and ensure they work in a concert.  They may support a Scrum of Scrums (SoS) or similar.  The APM also handles the interaction with the business governance of the organization.  If your organization is large, you will need an Agile Portfolio Management Leader or team.  This leader focuses on providing visibility to the highest value work so that the organization (and teams therein) are building the highest value work to the customer.

Ultimately everyone within the organization should be focused on understanding and delivering customer value every step of the way. Getting to that value oriented mindset is critical to the success of Agile. It takes teamwork to get there and that team is the entire organization.

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You can see a presentation that covers many of these roles at: http://www.boston-spin.org/slides/boston_spin_slides_2010_09.pdf