Merging scrum teams and organizational hierarchy
We're working hard to create and maintain high fidelity scrum teams. One challenge we have is handling the HR side of things for the scrum team members. We're a smaller organization and we can have a lot of influence on how to adapt our organization to work well with scrum teams, but I'm finding it hard to find good information on this topic.
What does it look and feel like?
Who does the performance reviews, salary adjustments, and other HR issues?
Who determines team or project budgets?
Who does the hiring/firing?
How does the organizational hierarchy scale out as the teams grow or new teams are created?
Is being an "HR manager" (whatever that means) a full time job? How do these managers interact with scrum teams?
I've searched through this forum and read quite a few articles. There's a fair amount of discussion, but no real models or examples that are explained in depth.
Currently we have a type of matrix structure in place. Each person in Engineering has an HR manager that does deal with performance reviews, raises, and career plans. However they're often not in-touch with what's really happening with the development teams or the project they're working on. And out of necessity, many of these managers aren't even in Engineering. We'd prefer they be engineers, but we haven't been able to define roles and structure that is interesting enough to even get engineers interested in essentially switching careers to manage our people. We also have the department head that deals with the bigger problems, like firing, or budgets, but this doesn't scale and we've pretty much reached their limit on capacity.
I'd love to hear about any insights people can share from experience.
There are some good insights into how one might approach that problem in Mike Cohn's book "Succeeding with Agile". I haven't put them to the test myself, so I can't tell if they're any good ;-)
Succeeding with Agile does have some useful information on this topic.
The biggest idea I came across on this search was phrased like this:
Teams deliver the work, managers deliver the teams
Another great source is the Management 3.0 book. It has 6 points for management to put effort into:
Energize People
Empower Teams
Align Constraints
Grow Structure
Develop Competence
Improve Everything
Agile team is a task force, regardless your organisation strcuture. e.g. project based, functional strcuture and matrix.
It's belived and proved that most small organisaitons take project based structure, where the PM is empowered on performance review, budget and hiring and etc. Some even decide on the salary and bonus.
In Agile/Scrum world, PO takes the final responsibility. I won't be surprised that people say PO should be empowered for these. Neither will I be surprised that people say dev team should not 'report to' PO or people say PO is never supposed to take organisational responbsibilioties. I agree with them all.
So unfortunately, there is no simple and practicle answer to your question to you to use right away. You would have to consider different management models and figure out the best one suiting your organisation.
The good thing is your organisation is not a big one, meaning you can try and change quickly.