If you’ve ever been involved in building a single product with multiple teams you know how tricky it can be. With competing ideas and different priorities it’s not always smooth sailing.
好的一面是, there’s always solutions and good habits to overcome the types of challenges that come with scaling a project like this. Here’s some of the challenges you may come across along with the lessons learned and experiences I’ve had when I’ve encountered them.
各自为政，士气低落
One of the first challenges you can come across with this type of work is building a truly unified team. I’ve seen this most when there’s no pre-planning session for everyone to get together and define the shared objective. This sense of siloed working becomes obvious when you soon find yourselves without a single backlog of work (more on that later). Before you know it, the whole team is feeling the pressure and now there’s low morale.
孤立的工作就像每天吃同样的食物. Daily pizza might sound great at first, but after a while it gets dull. 工作也是一样. If you have a long project and people are working on the same stuff for too long – always seeing and receiving the same problems – you’ll get low morale across the team.
在你意识到这一点之前，每个团队都在以一种孤立的方式工作. 那么我们如何解决这个问题呢? It’s time to involve representatives from each group in a team meeting. This way they can be updated on everyone’s workflow and take information back to their teams. Providing this space for visibility on the work coming from everyone gives people the chance to speak with their peers and decide who’s best to take on certain tasks. 我还看到这个空间鼓励团队相互支持, often happening organically – building that essential team morale.
相互冲突的产品积压
Working in silos can also mean that each team has their own backlog where there’s no visibility and you often don’t know what others are working on. With this lack of oversight it’s 真的 easy to lose the actual goal that you’re working towards for your single product.
所以最简单的方法就是把所有东西都放到一个待办事项列表中. 那我们就把积压的工作分享给大家吧. And let’s prioritise the backlog, not per team, but as a team of teams. Having a Scrum Master be the product owner for the different teams is crucial. 他们会帮助你分清轻重缓急, rather than having conflicting priorities coming for different groups.
From there you can come together to decide on what objective you want to have done in a couple of weeks. 你想完成的一件事是什么? Okay, now to accomplish that, what are the crucial results that we need? 我们需要做的事情的基本结果是什么? 这就是如何开始.
帮助! 有太多的依赖
每个团队都有自己擅长的领域. So if the work is too dependent on one specific team then you start to see a queue grow and cause delays. 在硬币的另一面, 如果你在用户界面上没有任何工作要做, 例如, that team would be very much idle – which is no benefit to anyone.
Now, there’s often parts of a system that need more TLC than others. 这意味着总有更高的需求. But if that team has people on holiday, it means your capacity to deliver 真的 减慢. 然后你不断增长的任务队列会变得更长.
But it’s important to remember that there’s always work to be done. 如果到目前为止你的产品遇到了很多挑战, 重构和解决技术债务是值得思考的. Focusing on this means you’re not only working towards improving the software technically but also solving problems for the users.
If you’ve also implemented the team meeting we mentioned earlier (wink wink) then more visibility means priorities can be shifted and adapted – truly channelling the agile manifesto. 根据我的经验, I’ve seen teams work together much more efficiently when you’ve broken down silos in this way. Teams talk to one another and everyone understands other capacities. There’s often collaboration to make sure everyone’s clear on who’s taking what task, 所以没有人感到压力.
技巧、习惯和沟通
扩展敏捷实践可能很棘手, particularly when you’re introducing more teams to your project than ever before. When working on one product there’s a lot of priorities to balance and often conflicting challenges. But I truly believe if you draw from your arsenal of agile techniques, build good habits and strong communication you can create a unified team that delivers an effective product.
Sharing my learnings through this post I know there’s always lessons to learn and experiences to draw from. I’m excited to continue practising scaling agile with projects at Made Tech and building my own box of tips and tricks.
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