Advice for Enterprise Work Management with Multiple Teams
Hi,
We have adopted Scrum and have many teams now in full swing. The teams support very different internal efforts; some do web development, some do hardware setup, others do network maintenance and identity management... Many of our projects require a bit of work from multiple teams and we're finding that there's often conflicting priorities that lead to competition for teams' time. Each team's backlog is their own (usually having nothing to do with one another), but sometimes cross-team work is required. For example to set up a new web application we need the infrastructure team to set up a virtual server and identity to establish the accounts. These are tasks those teams do all the time, and we usually have a scrum of scrums type meeting to ensure everyone's on the same page, but those teams' managers often step in and change their priorities such that providing for other teams' needs becomes a challenge. Has anyone else dealt with this in a successful way?
Respectfully,
Ginni
The teams support very different internal efforts; some do web development, some do hardware setup, others do network maintenance and identity management
From what you go on to say, it sounds as though the teams do not support the delivery of "Done" increments. They face extensive dependencies.
- What has caused them to be organized in such a way?
- Rather than prioritizing work, shouldn't management be prioritizing agile change?
Why have you adopted Scrum? Who came out with that idea, and what assumptions were made? How did you assess that you truly adopted Scrum? What kind of product or products do you develop? Is there one or more Product Owners? etc.
There are a lot of questions that we may ask, but based on your brief description it looks like it is not adopted, and even it may be not a good choice in your situation, thus creating unnecessary frustration.