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Agile Development Conference & Better Software Conference West
June 2–7, 2013 | Las Vegas, NV
Scrum Teams: Optimizing Performance
Andy Jordan PMP is the founder and president of Roffensian Consulting. Andy is a seasoned business professional with experience in many industries on two continents. After a career managing high profile, business critical projects for many organisations Andy moved into leadership of project management offices and built a reputation for building, rescuing and improving this key function. His approach of tailoring processes to the style and ability of the organisation, and focusing on the development of project staff rather than the short sighted approach of meeting project deliverables at all costs has repeatedly shown dramatic results.
While agile approaches to project execution are certainly cool, they are only able to survive and thrive because they work--“cool” doesn’t pay the bills. Take a look at any number of studies and you will see that organizations that have successfully implemented an agile approach have noticed measurable improvements in the quality of products developed.
While there can be a number of reasons for this, there’s no doubt that a large part of the benefit comes down to the team--the group of cross-functional individuals who are responsible for executing the sprints that make up the Scrum approach. In this article I want to look at how we can optimize those teams, and ensure that the benefits are as great as they can be.
The concept
Let’s start at the beginning with the basic concept of the team in a Scrum approach. The team consists of a group of individuals who collectively own all of the deliverables of a sprint. Over time the team may evolve as different skills are required to complete the tasks within a sprint, but this is a gradual evolution. By definition therefore, the team members have to be from a number of different functional areas--they need to have enough skills to complete the tasks within a sprint.
If we think back to a traditional waterfall approach to project management, we know that building a team from different parts …
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"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important. " - Bertrand Russell |