Hello everyone. My name is Vibhu Srinivasan, and today’s topic is one that comes across quite a bit in workshops and when I work with agile teams. And the topic is do we have part-time members in a scrum team? And why do we need to have persistent teams? So let’s spend a few minutes looking at that question.
Let’s take an example of a marketing team and let’s say we have six people in this team and these people may have different skill sets. For example, we may have two of them who could be social media folks, we may have two members who are possibly copywriters and then may have two of them who are just good at writing like they are great at writing blogs. So, let’s say those are kind of long-lived scrum teams. Along with this team, we’ll have two more people. So we’ll have someone who prioritizes the work for the team. Oftentimes we call this person a product owner or a product manager. And then we have someone who is more of a scrum master nowadays, we call them an agile coach itself. Right? So, this unit of people is what we typically call a scrum team.
Now it could happen, this team might depend upon some people, Right? For example, they may depend upon a video person for editing the video. So that could be one part-time role. The second could be the people managers that these people report to so that those people need to know what’s happening. The third group could be some kind of security people who are interested in the content that’s been published. They make sure the videos are secure and they’re not posting stuff that’s been not supposed to post. So these are the people that this team depends upon to get their work done. I would like to call them team friends.
Our goal over time is to learn from our friends and then remove the dependencies over time.