Scrum Team Dysfunction

[K. Thomas]

Hi all,

 

I have a team that has 3 managers, Product Owner, Dev lead, QA lead,  mostly contractor staff and some FT staff that report to those managers (including me) and a few offshore developers. So it's not the ideal scrum team by a long shot but it's our reality that will not change. I'm the scrum master for the team and have a team member, who's a manager, that doesn't trust that the offshore team is giving accurate estimates for their work and feels that they are  overestimating their hours per task. She doesn’t trust the Lead developer or the Manager of the offshore team. We do backlog grooming and planning together and she doesn’t bring up her concerns then. She  complains later during scrum or during manager meetings that she believes they under allocated. The Lead developer and manager pulled me aside to say it’s impacting their team’s morale. I’ve been encouraging the developers to be as transparent as they can with their work. Lot’s of details in stories and task, etc… to help address this but it’s not working.

 

A suggestion that the Dev Lead and Offshore manager made is that the QA manager should come to them directly with these concerns. Not bring it to the entire team. If this were a cross functional team then I wouldn’t agree to this since I feel that the way to build trust is to be open with the team. But since our team is so stratified it’s hard to build trust since team members won’t freely speak. Should I follow the suggestion and have these type of complaints made between managers? Any other advice?  -Karen

[Pierre Neis | We&Co]

Tips:

- PO isn´t team´s manager, is a team mate

- Dev Lead is leading the Development Community of practice and ensure that (s)he doesn´t interfere with team´s decisions, and is a support of the team

- QA Lead is leading the QA Community of Practice and is a support of the team

- Contractor staff are team mates, ensure that they are empowered and free to talk: avoid the silence of a customer/provider relationship

- make everything transparent: work, decisions

- protect the development team also if it´s an offshore contractor: visit them often or at least work from there (most effective solution) or bring them in your location

- set up team rules based on scrum principles

- transparency is made through accurate tooling like « Jira », Wiki, Skype Business (to record reviews), Slack or whatever 

- ensure that you have a Release Roadmap (3 months or shorter) to ensure that your burndown is burning down and not having spoiled children adding each time more incoherent stuff

- work with your users

- ensure that your developers are meeting as often possible the users

- ensure that the Product Owner is not only a Business Analyst but doing real work translating user product vision

- use the time management and scrum meetings as defined communication plan: only scrum meetings

- ensure that your development team is doing planning poker and not having a manager giving estimates for them: this allows you having a velocity or capacity

- ensure that your Product Owner has set up Business Values on User Stories made by Customer not by the PO

- then link Roadmap with Story Points and Business Value: this is helpful to translate their work in your transition to agile

- coach the spoiled children (management) and try to understand their needs

- help them to identify they work and achievement (personal kanban is helpful)

- fill the gap and remove the unnecessary managers and give them new responsibilities (give the dog a bone)

This is a 6 months plan, than usually work ;)  

PierreNEIS
Senior Lean Agile Coach | Associate
M: +352 / 661 727 867
UK: +44 / 203 239 52 60
wecompany.me | You can book me

Actually Scrum Coach for S4HANA/Hybris Billing @ SAP SE

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Scrum Alliance - transforming the world of work." group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to scrumallianc...@googlegroups.com.
To post to this group, send email to scruma...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/scrumalliance.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.