I’m still working my way through one of the more painful team consolidations of my career.  One thing that’s made it hard was my assumption that the use of Agile methods and Scrum would make everything easy.  Take three teams, make all work visible, track it, and presto: An efficient, functioning software development team.

What I’ve come to realize is that the primary benefit of Scrum is that Scrum brings teams closer to their customers.  Frequent meetings, short iterations, and phased deployments are all meant to keep the customer in the loop.  It’s true that as teams become proficient with Scrum they tend to become more efficient.  But I don’t think it’s true that Scrum automatically helps people work together.

Instead, Scrum can point out when teams aren’t good at working together.   And it really illustrates when teams, especially teams in sustaining mode, are reacting to their customers instead of innovating with them.  At the moment we’ve inherited a huge backlog of tools, processes, and personalities.  It’s up to us to sort them all out.  Unfortunately, after 7 ½ months we’re still sorting.

What I’d recommend for any blended team is to look at your current product lifecycles and work on a single lifecycle for all work.  If you can’t objectively come up with one process, that’s a good indication that the new team might not be a good fit for being a single unit (which happens all the time in bigger companies).  Go ahead & self-organize into sub-teams.  Then repeat the process.

If you can come up with a single process, tackle each piece and standardize all of them.  Do this as soon as possible, as it can be uncomfortable.  Standardize your requirements gathering and tracking, your exploration and technical analysis, your project planning, development standards, validation and sustaining processes.  Standardize all of it.  Make this your top priority, get it out of the way, and get back to work.

Lastly, managers of blended teams should realize what I’m suggesting is a disruptive process.  But you’ve just reorganized the team is already disrupted.   Don’t pull the bandage off slowly and force the team through a prolonged transition phase, lowering their productivity over the long term.  You can role model leadership to your team and drive a true consolidation.  Destroy roadblocks, reassure those on your team who are afraid of change, and push forward to create something efficient and beautiful.  Then use Scrum to reengage your customers in a way that they’ll love.

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