Scaling scrum and overcoming challenges

Should you’ve ever been concerned in constructing a single product with a number of groups you understand how difficult it may be. With competing concepts and totally different priorities it’s not all the time clean crusing. 

The nice factor is, there’s all the time options and good habits to beat the forms of challenges that include scaling a venture like this. Right here’s a number of the challenges chances are you’ll come throughout together with the teachings realized and experiences I’ve had after I’ve encountered them. 

Navigating silos and low morale

One of many first challenges you’ll be able to come throughout with this sort of work is constructing a really unified staff. I’ve seen this most when there’s no pre-planning session for everybody to get collectively and outline the shared goal. This sense of siloed working turns into apparent once you quickly discover yourselves with out a single backlog of labor (extra on that later). Earlier than you already know it, the entire staff is feeling the stress and now there’s low morale.

Siloed working is like consuming the identical meals every single day. Every day pizza may sound nice at first, however after some time it will get uninteresting. It’s the identical with work. If in case you have an extended venture and individuals are engaged on the identical stuff for too lengthy – all the time seeing and receiving the identical issues – you’ll get low morale throughout the staff. 

Earlier than you already know it, every staff is working in an remoted vogue. So how can we repair this? It’s time to contain representatives from every group in a staff assembly. This manner they are often up to date on everybody’s workflow and take info again to their groups. Offering this area for visibility on the work coming from everybody offers folks the prospect to talk with their friends and resolve who’s greatest to tackle sure duties. I’ve additionally seen this area encourage groups to assist each other, typically taking place organically – constructing that important staff morale. 

Conflicting product backlogs

Working in silos may also imply that every staff has their very own backlog the place there’s no visibility and also you typically don’t know what others are engaged on. With this lack of oversight it’s very easy to lose the precise purpose that you simply’re working in direction of in your single product. 

So the simplest factor to do is get all the things onto one backlog. Then let’s share the backlog with everybody. And let’s prioritise the backlog, not per staff, however as a staff of groups. Having a Scrum Grasp be the product proprietor for the totally different groups is essential. They’ll be the one that may also help you prioritise, slightly than having conflicting priorities coming for various teams.

From there you’ll be able to come collectively to resolve on what goal you wish to have finished in a few weeks. What’s that one factor you wish to accomplish? Okay, now to perform that, what are the essential outcomes that we want? What are the important outcomes of the issues we have to do? That’s learn how to get began. 

Assist! There’s too many dependencies

Every staff has areas they specialize in. So if the work is simply too depending on one particular staff then you definately begin to see a queue develop and trigger delays. On the opposite aspect of the coin, in case you don’t have any work to be finished on the person interface, for instance, that staff can be very a lot idle – which is not any profit to anybody. 

Now, there’s typically elements of a system that want extra TLC than others. And meaning there’s all the time folks in larger demand. But when that staff has folks on vacation, it means your capability to ship actually slows down. After which your rising queue of duties will get even longer. 

However it’s vital to do not forget that there’s all the time work to be finished. Should you’ve been going through a number of challenges in your product to date, it’s value desirous about refactoring and fixing technical debt. Specializing in this implies you’re not solely working in direction of enhancing the software program technically but in addition fixing issues for the customers.

Should you’ve additionally carried out the staff assembly we talked about earlier (wink wink) then extra visibility means priorities might be shifted and tailored – actually channelling the agile manifesto. In my expertise, I’ve seen groups work collectively far more effectively once you’ve damaged down silos on this approach. Groups speak to 1 one other and everybody understands different capacities. There’s typically collaboration to ensure everybody’s clear on who’s taking what job, so no one feels the stress.

Strategies, habits and communication

Scaling agile practices might be difficult, significantly once you’re introducing extra groups to your venture than ever earlier than. When engaged on one product there’s a variety of priorities to stability and sometimes conflicting challenges. However I really imagine in case you draw out of your arsenal of agile strategies, construct good habits and powerful communication you’ll be able to create a unified staff that delivers an efficient product. 

Sharing my learnings via this publish I do know there’s all the time classes to be taught and experiences to attract from. I’m excited to proceed practising scaling agile with initiatives at Made Tech and constructing my very own field of suggestions and tips. 

Should you’d like to listen to extra from us on venture supply and extra, join Made Tech Insights to get new weblog posts and different content material delivered straight to your inbox.