The Road to Agile Growth (part II)
Posted on July 19, 2009
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In my last blog, I communicated some of our challenges on scaling, and The Road to Agile Growth. Building the Optimal Scrum Team is definitely top of mind, and how we get there is secondary. But really, the most important thing was how to build the team, so that we could get there.
We’ve come up an idea, and that is to pilot the Optimal Scrum Team with FTE placeholders, rather than names. As we go through our preliminary estimates of our next release, we recognize the need to put dedicated FTEs in the form of estimates on our project plan, but we don’t necessarily need to put names on those FTEs. This allows for the entire team to be leveraged at the appropriate tasking level, and it also allows us to move the talent around to source new challenges as they arrive. We think this could benefit the team and work for the following reasons:
1. All team members will eventually play a part in this pilot team. No one gets singled out.
2. Knowledge transfer and ultimate intellectual property coverage of the technology will occur faster, as the team is physically located together, and can be rotated at iteration boundaries.
3. Key team members can be planned to be re-sourced as they are needed on other POC projects.
4. It gives us the opportunity to adjust and grow our Optimal Scrum Team architecture, so that when we do have the dedicated resources, we have our optimal team architecture nailed.
We’ll deploy the team within the next two weeks. Internally, we are not calling it the “Optimal Scrum Team”, rather, it’s our “Virtual (project-name) Team.” Stay Tuned!
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