Articles and videos on creating and managing cross-functional Scrum teams: scrum master, product owner and development team.
Self-organizing Scrum and agile teams need to determine how best to manage the flow of their work to get the job done each iteration. Flexible and high-performing agile development teams are composed of members with T-shaped skills and a Musketeer attitude that enable them to swarm to success.
As Agile and Scrum are increasingly used to manage software development projects in large companies, Nancy Nee, VP Global Product Strategy at ESI International, provides us with her viewpoint on how the transition to Agile is going on. She also shares some advice on how make the adoption process as smooth as possible.
In this blog post, J.D. Meier shares his experience of leading high-performance distributed teams for more than ten years at Microsoft. He describes a weekly schedule that begins with identifying 3 wins for the week on Monday to discussing 3 things going well and 3 things to improve on Friday.
This article from Rob Maher focuses on how to increase productivity. It discusses how changing a project staffing model could increase the productivity of project teams (PDF document). There is published evidence that short-lived groups of people brought together for a project are correlated with lower productivity. His view is that in an agile world, teams are permanent and the organization optimizes at the team level. Permanent teams enable consistent estimation, which is not possible using the matrix approach.
Scrum teams usually develop iteratively new product features. In larger project, teams can also be organized around layers or components of the product. In this article, Mukesh Chaudhary discusses how to manage the complexity with Scrum component teams and integration of their deliverables to make up a feature.
In this article, Steve Hunton explains that, even if people expect that the shift to Agile practices includes a wholesale shift of roles,, the ScrumMaster does not play the part of the traditional project manager. He thinks that the project manager role is more filled by the product owner. The project manager is a decision maker accountable to the business for accomplishing the project objectives. The ScrumMaster is a coach and facilitator that sits between the project and the customer. He isn’t responsible for the project or managing the development team. If you have questions about the product, then you should ask it to the product owner. He concludes that if the ScrumMaster is making decisions about a product, then Scrum has not been properly implemented and there’s going to be confusion and conflict about who does and owns what.
Learn how to achieve multiple team collaboration in large scale software development projects. Self-organization is a key concept for all Lean-Agile methods. However, as projects expand across the enterprise and, more specifically, cut across multiple teams, teams clearly can’t just organize in any way they want to. A blend of top-down direction with bottom-up self organization is needed. Lean provides the insights necessary for teams to self-organize within the context of the value stream within which the teams work. A top-down perspective, created by driving from business value, can provide insights on how teams must organize and work together.
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