Idealistic tenants – scrum team can choose its own work but sometimes teams are on multiple projects and can be overlap
Different roles:
· Product owner/stakeholders
· Scrum master
· Project managers
· Development
· Communications
Poll – teams that are using scrum, have you implemented very well? (one person)
Trying to embrace with with challenges? (3-4)
Pain points with scrum?
Multiple teams and projects
Inconsistent team
Very large teams (18-20+)
Distributed teams
Operations plus project teams
Shared product owners
Sometimes project manager has product owner role to translate goals and needs to scrum team.
Challenges with leadership understanding scrum? Does scrum work in academic environments? Higher ed is traditionally highly collaborative – having one product owner to make decisions doesn’t always work because one person usually can’t make the decisions.
Fix – incorporating stakeholders more frequently?
How are scrum teams organized? Vertically, horizontally? Sizes?
Some do it by project – need a designer, developer, etc., to form teams. Usually designers and UXers that are on multiple projects.
Resource management: Multiple project managers leading multiple teams. Sometimes they overlap, sometimes they don’t. How do you track how people are allocated?
SWS – as team has grown over past year, grew from one PM to three. Have tried resource management with Google sheets or Smart sheets that can roll up and do reporting to map out pipeline. UX and Design are needed intermittently, so you can block out their time for a percentage for a specific period. Scrum teams are 3-5 people and has worked reasonably well. Usually consists of front end, back end/tech support, project manager serving as scrum manager/product owner. A lot of our project managers serve as account manager.
Large Teams. Stand ups can be 30-45 minutes if you have a lot of backchannel conversations or 1-2 hours if everything’s on the table. Another group says it can be 20 minutes if people just touch on priorities and take blockers offline. SWS does 30-minute scrum in the mornings but try to keep it under 10 minutes. Can take things offline afterwards.
Distributed Teams. Challenge – time zones. Separate teams in the same building working on different pieces but don’t communicate on overall project.
SWS – 1/4 to 1/3 of team is remote. One person is three hours ahead so end of day sync-up doesn’t work. Need to accommodate schedules. Also have done dedicated dev days where there are not meetings. Many people report remotely that day, works as a heads-down day. Also invites stakeholders to the working sessions. Having them in the room gives you the ability to get quick answers.
Operations and projects. For SWS, has support on websites where everything feeds into JIRA, at least development-oriented requests. Support team is in the daily scrum but doesn’t participate in kick-offs or backlog reviews. Two-week sprints work well for the team.
Another team – “at bat” person for the week where they are the go-to person for the week for the incoming questions so others can concentrate on their projects. Another group tried and found that some are better than others at it so not all want to be rotated in, so abandoned scrum and went back to waterfall. SWS – dedicated support team is helpful, majority of time is dedicated to support but have some time on projects.
