How do you communicate with non-scrum teams?

The level of engagement here is key to gaining understanding of how the team works. One of the common problems can be different meanings for the same terminology across 2 teams. Simply asking how they do thing is often not enough, observing how a team work is the quickest way to bridge the gap. the is a short term cost here but it provides a long term gain. Understanding what motivates the team, and if all team members are motivated by the same thing, will also help how best to interact with the team.

Your personal level of effort matters here. I try to get verbatims from individuals I know I'm going to invite to a group discussion later on. Start 1-on-1 via instant communication tools (Slack, Teams, whatever) and casually ask about their needs/problems. Try to hit a few different target audience members. Collect responses into themes. Funny thing: The context paragraph mentions goals - I have done away with "goals". Ask people about the >impacts< they want to make. "How is this product going to impact the [customer, process, experience, partner, etc.] Collect the themes together and have focus group conversations. Unless you are dealing with a massive audience, everyone gets to be heard. If you do have a massive audience: Surveys.

One important factor in considering the nature of this communication, which can be derived from the context in which the non scrum team operates, is the information that needs to be consumed by the non scrum team. If being non-scrum fits their purpose, these channels only need to be platforms where transactional details are exchanged between teams. It is also important for an organisation to be cognizant of not inducing scrum principles through these channels where they aren't required.

No one wants another meeting on their calendar, but having an agreed upon touchpoint is critical. If you want them to show up and be engaged, you need to engage FIRST. Ping everyone and ask if they have content/questions/risks to discuss. Collect it into one sheet. Send out a poll and ask people to vote on which issues are most important to them. Now use the prioritized agenda. You're adding value and respecting their needs. If you invest in making their time worthwhile, they will relax their boundaries when you need something "urgent" or out of cadence.

Trust in a combination of scrum and non scrum teams is critical to the mindset of high performing teams with cross functions. Trust brings transparency as well as a safe environment to solve together any issues that arise.

For a non scrum team , we need to give them time and space to work on the new agile approach. Mostly to adapt to agile the team will need to start to accommodate other members for backup and equip them with sufficient knowledge and encourage them..