Autonomous Squad members spend about 90% of their allocated time in their squads collaborating via pair-working, three amigos and scrum ceremonies cross-competence to deliver value.
To ensure their time isn’t misspent they also need to go through learnings, meet opportunities and challenges with their common-competence fellows. To assure squad alignment, this conversation should be revisited on a weekly basis.
To make certain squads aren’t held up by a shortage of critical competence, cross-squad communications should be synchronised to occur all at the same time.
XSCALE adopts the Spotify practice of Chapter Meetings. Optimum timing for these is immediately prior to weekly squad retrospectives. This serves both to ensure that squads are never starved of competence, and that each retrospective is fully informed by Whole Board Thinking about the experiences of the other squads in their portfolio.
Each Chapter Meeting also selects a chapter leader to participate in the portfolio squad meeting, which may be held simultaneously with the squad retros.