AGILE QUESTIONS
Scaling Scrum
We’re going to coach a project where some Scrum Teams will be resident here in Genoa (nearly 4-5 teams), while other teams (2 or 3) will be placed in India.
You can imagine the “logistic problems” we’re going to face (different time zone, different knowledge of the projects “arguments”, different languages, etc.)
As we’d like to try with this project a “strict” SCRUM approach, trying to adopt and follow what SCRUM Guide tell us, the first question is:
- How would you managed the problem that SCRUM Teams are not co-located ?
Furthermore, our “scaling” implementation will be a LESS one:
- 1 PO for all Teams
- 1 SM for each Team (maybe 1 for 2 Teams)
We ask:
-
How would you manage a coordination between Scrum Masters ? A SM Community ?
-
Is the decision to have an unique PO “winning” ?
Agile Lean Officer / Genoa Area, Italy
Agile coaches answer:
I would bring the problem of the distributedness back to the Scrum Teams.
What do they need in order to effectively work together? These tools and infrastructure then has to be bought or organized.
Many things might relieve them from the pain (partially), like travelling to different sites to work together sometimes, video / audio connection readily available, Slack, Skype, … at any time, …
LeSS sounds good, and one Product -> one Product Owner is the right approach in my opinion.
This PO can delegate many tasks regarding Product Backlog management or refinement, but remains overall accountable. Therefore he/she is the single source of truth.
I like the idea of communities of practice, not only for Scrum Masters, but also for the Development Teams, e.g. AngularJS CoP, CI CoP.
Answer by Peter Götz