The invisible cost of double-jobbing for shared resources in Agile
The stated ‘best practise’ of Scrum-flavoured Agile software development (and therefore the target state of many transitioning environments) is a self-organising, cross-functional collection of individual resources capable of delivering whatever they agree to deliver, within a time window and within the resources (including skills) they have available to them, along with someone to coordinate and facilitate their activities and someone to ensure they are working on the next most useful bits of work. All very fine and all generally very achievable. We see this setup everywhere.
In many Agile software development environments, there comes a time when the Team needs the input of specific knowledge, skills or expertise which is otherwise not normally part of the Team.