How is your team’s agile practices?
As a contractor, I often scrambled upon term ‘agile’. We have usual agile practices and daily stand-ups and task list … (blah… blah… blah). And what ends up with without understanding or proper knowledge in the team often trying to patching up Projects/Product/Services like fire-fighting and run towards to deliverables, although there is always a team with QA, Tester, Developer, Senior Dev, Lead, Junior, Trainee, Leaver, … and Manager,all that.
But what actually is missing here. End objective or goal, when a new member join or any one leaving the team, do you have any procedures to transfer their knowledge, I am not talking about documentation or anything that only authors can understand but actual person who can explain it to anyone what existing problems or objectives within ten minutes or so?
SME (Subject Matter Expert)
That is where role comes into a play called SME. Keep your SME (Subject matter Expert) handy all the time, His/Her devotion is vital for the life cycle of the project/product/service and that should only be dedicated to that person and may be he/she could be a product owner for rest of the cycle. In other words, if your team has not got SME or Owner then you are not agile team. You may be fire-fighting and exhausted with overloading requests from board above. And thus project fails, people strains and left. No matter how good managers, leaders, devotional developers or loyal peoples are, if you are not able to help them to solve their understanding of the existing problems, no matter what it will head towards to failure.
Solution
So what is solution, look back and assess it. Look through retrospective histories and you will find how it was impacting your team and new joiner or leavers. Appoint SME and make sure that is experienced and resourceful. If you want to keep retain people in the team then appreciate their small achievement and acknowledge it. Thus it will remain life time within your team and that team will become truly agile.
If your team needs a leader or senior full-stack developer to deliver some projects. please contact me for that. I will be delighted to help. I look forward to hearing back from you soon.
Ravi
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