Monday, February 13, 2012

Thoughts on SCRUM team member changes

change is to scrum what salt is to snails.  My team has been more or less consistent for a year now with some changes in QA and copy.  I myself am a QA person and have been there from day one, so we have at least one immutable QA resource. The copy change brought in someone new to the company and directly planted them into our team.  These changes have caused bumps but nothing course changing.

The change of Dev people has been something of a hit for us. Our normal high performance goals are being missed at level close to our initial founding of SCRUM.  We seem to be off course and there is a pretty grim outlook setting in. 

Currently individuals are being asked if they wish to remain on scrum or change.  I think we are at a natural duration to look at change as individuals, we have mastered this style of work and can begin taking the benefits outside the time.  We could even just need new challenges.  Our problem as team founders is the desire not to see this ship sink.

The seem to be a set of a few skills that fall outside of our team roles are key to our success.  I think if you watch any strong team you are going to see some skills or knowledge that elevates the team beyond the ordinary.  For our team one of the designers has a great deal of historic information on what has been done and can quickly suggest pages starting points for design and development.  We have another person who seems to have a similar broad scope on what is happening with global pricing changes.  Losing these skills that take at team from functional to highly skilled may cripple or dissolve said group

The lessons to be learned are change of the labor force upsets scrum.  Change of duplicated or subordinate team members is not going to kill a team.  Change of a lead or autonomous team member, resets team integration and team must be reestablished.  Also there are some team members that possess skills beyond their role.  Changing them can destroy the group.

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