New Scrum Set Up, Thoughts?
Before we had 3 different teams, each with their own PO and cross-functional team; no Scrum Master or Agile Coach. This also meant that each team had autonomy, their own backlog, grooming, planning, technical planning, sprint reviews and retro meetings. One thing that might not have been ideal was that the PO was also the supervisor of the Lead Engineer; but I would argue that teams made the best of it and made it work. Another thing worth noting is that each team had a very clearly defined domain of features with in the organisation, often ridiculously broad for a team of about 3-5 engineers, but clear. Furthermore, each team has been dealing with an inmense amount of technical debt as in the past it had not been prioritised.
The idea of the new set-up is that we now have a CPO which calls the shots; she is not known for balancing tech-debt and business value. The idea was advertised as a great one as it should enable better alignment across the teams, although to most of my colleagues I've spoken to it feels to us like a great setup for micro-management. Cynicism aside, we now have a single backlog and a therefore single grooming meeting; teams though, still have a very clear domain that does not easily overlap with one another. POs are somehow supposed to work together across all teams, while each still being the expert of their own team. Additionally, the CPO decides on what specific projects the teams should work on, priorities and resource allocation across all three teams, meaning if a project is high-prio/high business value but one team is not enough, in theory she could ask multiple teams to work on it despite the topic not being in the domain of one of the teams.
If this doesn't sound specific enough, that is because it is not. The idea was presented about a month ago to us but the way this is really supposed to work is still a mystery.
As an Engineer in one of these teams, this sounds very messy but I wanted to get your opinion in case I am just not being open-minded enough. Do you think this can work? Thoughts? Should I jump off ship?
Three things:
- It seems that there is one Product Backlog, and yet multiple Product Owners. How many products are there...and who shall be accountable for maximizing product value?
- It sounds as though there is an authority of some sort (CPO) who organizes teams. What is then expected to happen regarding self-organization?
- Scrum is not being followed, and yet various Scrum terms are being used. Are the benefits of using Scrum still expected to accrue?
All of @Ian Mitchell's points are spot on, as usual.
I honestly don't see any Scrum in the setup other than use the of some Scrum terms. This seems more like standard Project Management practices than Scrum. It eptimozes the "throw bodies at a problem", "all developers are alike", and "I know better what needs to be done than anyone else" philosophies.
Do you think this can work?
That all depends on what expectations are being set for success. Sure it could "work" but what does that look like? You never really stated a problem other than the lack of priotization of technical debt so I am not sure why the change was needed.