Why Scrum Teams Need to Learn

When developing complex innovative products, the Development Team will have different a workload for each one of their members. The speed of the entire Development Team is often limited by the speed of the specialist with peak loads. To overcome this problem, employees need to expand their competencies and help each other. In this case, it will be possible to switch from local to system optimization.

Meet a Development Team in which John, Nick and Mike are working. They are narrow specialists. Nick works with the green technology only. John specializes in blue technology, and Mike – in yellow technology. The Development Team is cross-functional because it has all the necessary skills to develop an Increment.

The Development Team gets features from the Product Owner. Most of them require all three technologies: green, blue and yellow. Imagine the Development Team pulled three features during the Sprint Planning, and here’s a shot of their Scrum Board somewhere in the middle of the Sprint:

John and Nick are still working on the first feature, because there is lots of work to do on the green and blue technologies. Mike has finished working on his part of the work in the first and second features and now has started the third one. What is he going to do next when it’s done? Most likely, he will ask the Product Owner if he can pull the next feature from the Product Backlog and work on it. The result of the Sprint is a large amount of unfinished work in progress (WIP), and only one feature is Done during the Sprint.

Many Scrum Teams work the same way. The number of completed features in the Sprint is determined by the developer with the peak workload. In our example Sprint, this is John.

Note that in the example above, all the developers worked, as they thought, very efficiently, and diligently exploited their competencies. But the whole system was sub-optimized – and only one feature is Done.

Imagine that our guys have upgraded their skills and the matrix of competences now looks better:

Let’s make a thought experiment and see if the Development Team became more effective. For the simplicity let’s assume they got the same features again.

Nick could help John who would have had the peak load with the blue technology. The team would have been able to complete two business tasks instead of one.