Getting Agile

When introducing Scrum into an organization with many teams there are usually questions about particular roles and how they will work with teams. Questions that I have heard in the past are:

• I work on features that cut across all or most of the teams, how can I possibly work with all of them?
• I am the only person or part of a small group that supports all of the teams, how will they work with me?
• Our department handles all of these aspects of software delivery, how will we assure quality won’t go down?

As has been said many times by many individuals, Scrum is NOT a silver bullet and it will NOT solve your problems. Scrum will make your problems visible and then it is up to the people within your organization to fix the problems. This is why I believe that the greater your organization can exhibit the five value of Scrum the greater success they will achieve with Scrum. Here are the five values:

• Courage
• Commitment
• Openness
• Respect
• Focus

I want to point out that all of these are needed, in double order, when we find out that people within an organization are “shared”. These people are usually called “shared resources” and anytime that I hear the word “resources” used to identify people it causes me to flinch. “Resources” can be moved around wherever they are needed with specific objectives and not a worry about how they will interact with people around them. At least this is my experience in discussions about moving “resources” around the organization. I like to call human beings “people” and even call them out by name because this causes people who are discussing their movement to address their skill sets and interactions more explicitly. OK, enough of my rant on “resources” versus “people”.

Courage is needed for management to acknowledge that sharing people across Scrum teams is going to cause a bottleneck and to take action. I have found that this phenomenon of going through a single source for that person’s function was already causing a bottleneck but the “hand off” culture allows it to hide from daily view. It takes commitment of either funds for more people or a program to distribute knowledge through mentoring for parts of this person’s functional role. It takes openness on the part of a person who is being “shared” too thin to point it out and make sure that something is done about it. Respect is necessary for all involved to assess the situation and ask for help in resolving the issue. Finally, focus is the value that guides us towards working with one team or at least one Product Backlog at a time.

Depending upon the granularity at which a person functions well, you may find working with a Scrum team or on the Product Backlog a better choice. If your functional role supports the delivery of technical functionality in terms of software development artifacts that are actually used by your end users then being on a Scrum team is better. If your functional role influences the product strategically but does not directly generate software development artifacts that end users use then working with a Product Owner ahead of the Scrum team may be more appropriate. Here are some symptoms of sharing people too thin:

• People mentioning that there are too many meetings
• Scrum teams waiting on dependent artifacts to be delivered
• People working overtime continually to keep up with demand
• Mentioning vacation time causes multiple organizational groups to think about how they will get along while a person is gone

Sharing people is always a potential bottleneck within an organization. Your organization may be able to function for a while with shared people but at some point, if you are lucky and your company grows, they will become spread too thin. Scrum can help you identify this problem and make it visible but it takes people in your organization with courage, commitment, openness, respect, and an eye on focus to fix the sharing of people too thin. Look for ways to find the granularity at which that person in their functional role works within the software delivery process and figure out how they can interact at that level for more appropriate focus and results.