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Retrospective with 2 Scrum Teams

Last post 06:26 pm March 20, 2024 by Daniel Wilhite
3 replies
01:48 pm March 18, 2024

Hi everyone,


I’m facing a case that I’m taking SM role in team A. And team B also have SM but he doesn’t want to take the retrospective event separately so I have to do retrospective with 10 dev plus 1 SM and 1 proxy-PO.


I have tried to take advice from developer with 4 years Agile experience but when I raised with the team in retrospective, everyone just declined it and said “Don’t bring more task to developers please” or “That’s not developers task”. And unfortunately, team B’s SM also joined with that idea and no one have no improve ACTION.


Another case is one developer suggest that the team should improve refinement event because we have missed some specifications due to lack of research about that request. In refinement event, we should just QA about request. But when I tried to raise that idea in retrospective, just like the old story, everyone declined.


I have tried to define what is happening and maybe the problems is:

  1. I can’t handle team which have too many members. It’s take time to listen one person idea in deepth (and maybe may experience is not enough to handle)
  2. Old members have experience in this business than me and I feel it’s hard to change their mindset
  3. Our proxy PO have been supporting developers task (request test data, when developers should create pull request, release process etc) about more than one year so the team lost confidence if he not support them


I’m thinking about split the team smaller and use LeSS to improve our process because in future, we gotta expand bigger with many team and one proxy PO….

I’m very happy if your guys give me some advice about this case.🥹


08:59 pm March 18, 2024

And team B also have SM but he doesn’t want to take the retrospective event separately

Why not? It sounds like there are two teams with two separate inspect-and-adapt opportunities. Why does he want these opportunities to be lost?


11:49 pm March 18, 2024

Thank for your answer.

It sounds like there are two teams with two separate inspect-and-adapt opportunities.

Because I have been in role Scrum Master for one year so I wanted to support him at first. But he and the whole team (include A and B) don’t want to split the team and because we also have one Product Backlog so I have keep this situation in several months. 
 


06:26 pm March 20, 2024

But he and the whole team (include A and B) don’t want to split the team and because we also have one Product Backlog so I have keep this situation in several months. 

If the team member themselves do not want to split, who decided that the team needed to be split and why? What problem was being solved by splitting into 2 teams when they are both working from the same Product Backlog?

As a Scrum Master, it is not your duty to make this kind of decision.  A Scrum Team should be allowed to self-organize, self-manage. Now, we all know that in the corporate world there are these people that have the word "Manager" in their title that usually make those kind of decisions.  So, if that is the case in your situation, you should work with that individual to help them understand how the Scrum framework works so that they can help you to impact change. 


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