The agile SCRUM team – bundled forces.

The agile SCRUM team.

Besides the key roles in SCRUM, there is still this unstructured collection of humans – the team. When we started to introduce SCRUM we simply put all developers into SCRUM teams and we were finished. Amazingly, this went quite well. Developers found themselves confronted with other tasks than pure coding – but as said they did well, accepted the responsibility, improved their intra-team communication skills and everything seemed fine.

From a pure developer’s view the story could end here already. BUT (you knew there would be a “but”, right?) software development as such doesn’t contain only software development tasks – especially not in a web environment.

How to treat the non-developer resources? What about architects, user experience, visual grafix, editors, system administrators, online marketeers, quality assurance? Are they part of the SCRUM team – or not? If not, how to get them to work together with the SCRUM team?

A lot of questions! What we changed so far …

We started to structure the team. Besides the developer we have a lead developer. This person actually leads the team from a technical perspective and acts as an architect for the team. Next to the developers we onboarded the quality assurance team members to let them work directly with the SCRUM team. In parallel, we put user experience specialists directly into the SCRUM team. The visual grafix persons are still external to the team and form a service center where multiple departments of the company got access to. Members of the editorial team participate in the daily stand-up meetings (well, most of them) – but are still not part of the SCRUM teams. The system administrators are associated to the various SCRUM teams we operate – but are not actually part of the team. Online marketeers? Other departments? They are also not part of the SCRUM team and communicate mainly with the product owners and scrum masters.

So, to summarize – our SCRUM team is structured like this:

Closely connected to the SCRUM team are:

  • editorial team member

Still in other parts of the organization:

  • visual grafix designers
  • system administrators
  • other departements

Is it optimal? Well, not really – but SCRUM in our organization is a living process – we’re still improving!

Lessons learned?

  • Initially, get the SCRUM team going with the product owner, scrum master, developers and quality assurance as team.
  • In a next step when SCRUM is well accepted and adopted start thinking about a better structure for your teams.

Good ideas needed? Have a look at Marty Cagan’s great and inspiring methods and principles @ svpg.com

Posted in Agile Software Development, SCRUM | Tagged developer, editors, lead developer, Marty Cagan, online marketeer, product owner, role, scrum master, svpg.com, system administrator, team, user experience designer, visual grafix | Leave a reply