There are many awesome practices we do at sipgate that I love to share with others. But we’ve also gotten some things very wrong, especially in the beginning in 2010. Let me spill the beans about 3 “do not recommend” things for a change 🙂
Double duty Scrum Masters
All the first Scrum Masters were recruited from existing employees and they stayed in their old role for 50% of the time. I was 50% UX designer and the others were developers. This introduces a huge conflict of interest between SM duties and being part of the development team. And the short term “gotta make the sprint goal” interests will nearly always win against long term “team’s gotta learn and improve” interests. Can’t recommend.
Dedicated Scrum Masters are a far better idea.
Afternoon temp teams
Sometimes you need a few special to work on a small project for a short amount of time. We call these task force teams “temp teams”. In the beginning we had temp team members work in their “real” team in the mornings and the temp team in the afternoons. Yeah, multi tasking late that wastes a lot of brain cycles. Can’t recommend.
Nowadays temp teams work together all day. They finish the project faster this way and return to their “real” team.
1 shared backlog for all teams
We had 5 teams, ~3 products and just one backlog. The product owners wanted to flexibly allocate teams to products depending on their changing priorities. Didn’t work out to well. The teams couldn’t identify with any product nor establish testing or coding styles for themselves. A sprint later another team would continue working on “their” feature and “ruin” it.
Today each team only works on one product. They can make it theirs, learn its ins and outs and own successes and failures.
What are things that didn’t work out for you? What do you do now?