Cultural Infrastructure

Many software companies talk about underpinning layers of software that allow various products to be built with the idea that interoperability and integration will just happen. These layers of software are called "infrastructure" in many environments. Without software infrastructures, many products are often forced to recreate the same functionality over and over, such as logging in to a system. Unfortunately, there are often many "infrastructures" which hurts the original intention of creating the base layer in the first place.

To minimize this, companies must first consider another layer, and this could be characterized as the cultural infrastructure. The cultural infrastructure is similar to getting everyone to do the wave at a baseball game. Each person can be individually shown how to standup, throw two arms in the air, and sit down; however, if the group as a whole isn't in sync, there is no wave. Setting the cultural infrastructure is often difficult because employees in a company are rarely sitting shoulder to shoulder within site distance of each other.

Setting the cultural infrastructure can be remedied (no pun intended) by first aligning goals and second, coordinating expectations. One way to do this with an Agile method is to use matching iterations and release cadences. With this model, people are thinking about the releases and planning at the same time. Adjustments needed by one team are domino-ed into the iterations of another team, and most importantly, the goal is the same for everyone at the same time.