An agile team is an interdisciplinary team
Goals
Build a high performing team
Description
Traditionally teams are split along professions rather than their relation to each other. In order to create high performing teams, you have to bring all disciplines together into one SCRUM team. A SCRUM Team is responsible to deliver an sprint, increment and release. Such a team is rougly 3-7 people in size, they are self organized, self contained and they can make decision for them self. No one, not the stakeholder, not the Product Owner, not the Scrum Master will (should) tell a team how a story should be implemented; as long as the team take up their responsibility to fulfill the acceptance criteria and definition of done. (Our experience is: A team that can technical decide upon their experience is faster, happier and delivers higher quality. Or in other words, self organisation is a core principle of SCRUM.)
It is important that a SCUM team is stable, changing the team will reduce the performance and to be expected quality of the results.
How you can figure out if your team is an interdisciplinary, self contained team? Here are some checkpoints:
- They have all the competences to implement the backlog – there is no “we have to wait for department # to finalize this.”
- They can decide what they can deliver within the next sprint
- They are self organized
- They are working closely together with the Product Owner
- They can estimate the vision and stories
Environment
Agile Projects
Platform
All
Implementation effort
Depending on the current situation this requires coaching
Applicability
New projects. But can be applied to entire organisations.
Caveats
Sometimes it is complicated to break up known structures and workflows.
