Surprise! Your Scrum Team Is Not Perfect

How often have you started with a perfectly formed Scrum team?

• Dedicated?
• Stable?
• Small?
• Cross-functional?
• Self-managing?

If you’re lucky, this is a non-issue; if you’re not, what can you do to arrive there?

I’ve witnessed two basic options:

1. Complain, moan and bitch.
2. Get over it and get on with it.

In Pareto fashion, based on my personal experience, approximately 80% of the time, people have chosen option 1 while approximately 20% of the time, people accept option 2. 

For those choosing to complain, I get it. If you happen to be on an imperfect Scrum team, you might have moaned and bitched:

• What was management thinking?
• Has everyone forgotten their Scrum training?
• How can we deliver when we have so many external dependencies?
• How can we gel as a team when we have so many part-time members?
• We’re being told what to work on and when to work on it. What decisions are left for us to make?
• How can we perform as one team when we have to juggle priorities inside and outside the team?

The fact is we don’t live in a perfect world. So, why should it be any different with new “Scrum teams”? They’re never perfect. Ever.

I recently coached a new Scrum team that:

• Overnight…
  • Grew from X to Y team members.
  • Multiplied from a single common work stream to three distinct and independent work streams.
• Lost their most knowledgeable technical leader just before team launch
• Had a third of its team members owe their primary allegiance to another team
• Was experiencing their first use of Scrum. A majority of its members were freshly trained in agile ways of working and Scrum while the rest were steeped in more classical ways of working.

This was far from perfect.

The team’s Product Owner (PO) started to lament and question the decision made by leadership to re-structure her team. She and the team were new to Scrum  and were already struggling to apply what they had learned in training. This decision put them put them further behind the eight-ball.

She felt trapped between learning to play her standard Scrum Guide based PO role and struggling to pivot and adapt her “Scrum team” to its imperfect reality.

However, rather than continuing to lament and complain about the situation at hand, she decided to do something about it. Surprisingly, she shifted her attention from product delivery to what would eventually be organizational design. With a little coaching and encouragement she channeled her energy away from complaining and towards problem-solving.

It started with visualizing why her team existed, what their scope was, and how her Scrum team worked and interacted. Specifically,

• Their key business stakeholders 
• The three work streams and their resulting work products 
• How the interactions amongst the three work streams evolved over time as the work products started to emerge 

A number of insights were gleaned from her visualization including:

1. Organizational design opportunities emerge with the ebb and flow of distinct work streams. Think alternate team topologies.
2. Increased interactions across work streams signalled that separate Scrum events could be re-combined to optimize SM and PO time and coordination efforts across the team. From imperfect to near perfect.
3. Coherence of the work products were dependent on the level and quality of interactions. Think Conway’s Law.

So, in this case, imperfection was met with acceptance and a path offering a deeper learning of agile ways of working and improvement.

Outcomes that would not have been achieved if the PO had started with a perfect team.