Staffing Agile Scrum Team.
The conversation on who is responsible for staffing a scrum team has always being a debatable issue among various practitioners. The founders of scrum have left this gate wide open for reasons unknown or at times very ambiguous.
Staffing and Scrum Founders.
Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, very wisely may have left the issue of staffing scrum team opened or very ambiguous for the following reasons.
1. Scrum teaches the process or framework. there is no tailored methodology to follow. Remember scrum practice is intended to solve empirical complex issues therefore scrum practice may be different from one product, project or organization to another. Know the process inspect and adapt it to your project or organization.
2. Organization adaptation model: Each organization is allowed to adapt Scrum as it sees fit. Since most organizations are historically set in its structures and norms; adaptation of new processes usually contains many pitfalls and detractors. For scrum to survive particularly in the early stages of adaptation, staffing is left to the host organization. In retrospect, this was a smart move, remember in most cases Scrum is introducing two new roles to that organization (Product Owner and Scrum Master). And a new way of getting work done via iterations or sprints. Traditional team dynamics are no longer in use. Depending on the speed of adaptation, organization span of influence may shift to these roles. Again, inspect and adapt to your organization.
3. Ease of Adaptations: Some of early adaptor's of scrum are startup companies, these company cultural norms or structures are not yet set or formed therefore very comfortable adopting the scrum processes. On the other hand, historically large very hierarchically structured organizations, see anything new particularly Agile processes like scrum as a threat therefore will crawl and fight to see it fail. Imposing a new process on these types of organization is very hard. I think the founders intended to make scrum introduction gradual, a department, a division or region, and rather than the whole organization.
Staffing by the Product Owner.
In some organizations the Product Owner hires the team. There are many schools of thoughts or debatable pros or cons to this process. I am not for or against this way of hiring except one has to make sure the team is truly independent, self-organizing and able to make decisions on how the work is done without the unnecessary influence of the product owner.
Staffing by the Scrum Master.
Scrum Master hires staffs: this is highly problematic. The role of a scrum Master is that of servant-leader not a master-leader. If the scrum master is the hiring person, this effectively has negated the scrum master role as a patient observer of the process, gate keeper, objective servant, teacher, coach, facilitator, enabler etc. etc. Can you imagine the scene during Daily standup or Sprint retrospective meetings? I strongly discourage organization from this practice. The scrum values spoke about courage, openness, respect or trust, making the scrum master the hiring master effectively may kill the team’s ability to be open, trusting or courageous. This may affect the team’s abilities to be self-organized, independent, communicate openly or experiment on how to get the work done.
Staffing by Department managers or IT organization:
In most organization staffing to a Scrum team is done by the department managers. A pool of staffs is allocated to the team from various areas - Development, testing or operation, marketing, business divisions etc. etc. This process of staffing is extremely very effective, you are pooling staffs from hopefully highly cross functional teams across your organization. This new scrum team does not owe their hiring gratitude to the scrum master or the product owner therefore can be more self-organized.
Staffing by PMO office.
Most large organization with a matured project management practice also have PMO office. PMO office usually maintains databases of staffs, their skills set, projects allocations and able to allocate staffs to a scrum team. Staff leveraging across multiple projects is one of the core functions of PMO office. This practice is ok on traditional waterfall projects. In Scrum or agile process each team member is required to focus in the sprint goals therefore must avoid the problem of context switching that happens in traditional projects. Part time allegiances to the scrum team has a very negative effects on the team’s productivity therefore is highly discouraged. PMO of office leaders must understand this factor.
This article is not intended to support, dismissed or cover all the intricacies of the above practices but to illuminate some light on them. Organizations methods of staffing really depends on how fluid the organization is in adapting to new market, customer, competition or technology in general to new environmental changes. Scrum practice has allowed staffing decisions to be internal to each organization. Hiring practices for a company like Ford Auto company is different to that of Spotify. The founders of Scrum in my opinion left this ambiguous for a reason.
Emmanuel Omobien, MBA, CSM