It has been a pretty difficult few weeks for me, busy, busy, busy and frankly more management than coaching. Cue air violins!
In the division I am working in there are three Scrum Teams, up until now I have been responsible for two and the third has tried a number of ways to accommodate the lack of a Scrum Master, one member of the team took on the role for a while on top of their other duties and a Project Manager took it on for a while, again on top of other duties. But these part-time roles have been unsuccessful and I was asked to take on a third team.
I was very reluctant to dilute my other responsibilities and expressed this to the department head, and so we agreed it will be temporary and I’ll be training a new Scrum Master for that team to take over in a few months. Which is great but also means I now have responsibility for three teams and training of a new SM, and we will be losing one extremely valuable member from a team. As I say Cue violins, but my concern is not just workload, it is the teams themselves, one of the teams already feels I don’t spend enough time with them and spreading me thinner wont help with that. So that is problem 1, 2 and 3 but my other and now more serious problem is that the final team is in a state of flux. The Product Owner has moved on to a new role and it has been difficult to find a replacement.
A Product Owner is a difficult role, and seemingly undesirable. The product is essentially a suite of very closely integrated sub-products with what is intended to be a single front end, the product cannot easily be split because of how closely coupled it is, but the system is so complex there are at least three Business Analysts and an Architect who when combined cover the understanding of the system. The chief architect is ultimately the product owner, he makes the call on the roadmap and the priority of content into the system, but doesn’t have visibility of the fine detail at an individual story level, that is down to the BAs who are doing it on top of their other responsibilities. So prioritisation is at Epic level, with the BAs prioritising the smaller individual stories.
And to cap it all we have hit a spate of recruitment and retention issues. We had decided that the volume of work was such that we would expand and have a second team on this product, but over the last few months two contractors have left, primarily for family reasons (and higher rates) and a very experienced member of the team has got a promotion so he too has left, and as I say another team member has volunteered to be trained as a ScrumMaster, all told a major impact on one relatively small team. So I have been very very busy recruiting (30+ interviews over the last 3 weeks). I have spent the last couple of weeks almost exclusively interviewing and screening CVs. Thankfully offers have been made and I’m hopeful we will have a new team up and running in a few weeks.
But it is essentially a brand new team; a new Product Owner Dynamic; and a major new piece of work. A new Product Owner, and 3 new proxy product owners(Business analysts) a new Scrum team comprised of a former tester and 4 new former developers (I say former as once in a Scrum team I hope they will all see themselves as a cross-functional team). All this got me thinking. At first I was anxious about the disruption, I am also anxious that the Product Owner representatives are not dedicated to what is a major product, but after some thought I realise that disruption is the wrong word, the team can’t really be disrupted, there isn’t enough left of the old team to call it a disruption.
What we have is a fantastic opportunity, we can create and build a new team from scratch. It is not often you get to join a team at the beginning and are able to shape it to be the team you want to be a part of, usually it is a case of fitting in. But the new team members are joining a high profile new product together and get to shape it as we collectively see fit.
All of the team have had some exposure to some form of agile development they seem strong developers and eager to use Agile, so there will be a degree of Scrum training and coaching but for me the crucial task is to build a team first, get them working together, learning strengths and weaknesses and growing into a team. I still have a lot of worries, especially about growing a new team whilst also supporting the existing teams, I cannot give the teams as much attention as I would like, but I am actually pretty excited about the prospect of helping build a new agile team.
I have been trying to think of a good place to start, no doubt the level of Scrum training will vary so I thought that I might try a combined Scrum Training and team building exercise. My train of thought led me to http://www.lego4scrum.com/ it is my hope that when they get on board, I will set up a session for them and mix it up with the other existing Scrum Teams. I plan to write up a review after the event which I will post here.
John Yorke 