In this article, we shall investigate why the learning and development of multi-functional specialists in Scrum is the core of organizational Agility and value optimization. Many Development Teams are not collaborating as real teams, but as a collection of narrow specialists focused on “their” tasks (QA, Backend, iOS, Android, etc). This leads to an ever-increasing number of explicit and implicit backlogs, “dependencies”, more Work-In-Progress (WIP), queues, and unsatisfactory lead times. How does it affect organizational Agility and what to do about it?
Recently I observed a few teams in a large service company during an extended enterprise Go See effort. I attended various Scrum Events, followed teams collaborating daily, noticed how they dealt with conflicts, and much more. We have done it for a very sound reason - to uncover the underlying system structures and come up with deep interventions. What immediately caught my attention was the focus on resource utilization during Sprint Planning. Some of the phrases that caught my attention:
The fundamental issue in complex environments is that work is never distributed evenly for a cross-functional team in a Sprint. Over the years, my observation has been that many teams do not respect the order of the Product Backlog because it means facing a painful skill gap.
Respecting the Product Backlog order means facing a skill gap!
When the Scrum Team keeps the goal of making people busy, it has multiple implicit backlogs, not one. The typical phrase that you can hear is, “I will do this feature because I am familiar with X technology.” The Product Owner is forced to change the order of the Product Backlog to make people busy in Sprint. Thus, the team doesn’t work on the most critical features from a customer perspective and sub-optimizes the value delivery. Let’s take a look at this from a Systems Thinking perspective (see Figure 1).
We obtained the first balancing loop “B1: Making people busy”. The more perceived skill gap to develop the most critical features from a customer’s perspective, the more team stress, the more pressure to increase the number of implicit backlogs (“these are my features, those are yours”). That makes developers locally efficient at the cost of sub-optimizing the whole.
Developers are efficient at the cost of sub-optimizing the whole!
Pay attention to the mental models:
This dynamic doesn’t happen at a single team level only. When the knowledge gap becomes really large, then new teams with separate backlogs emerge. Let’s investigate this dynamic further.
One company of a friend of mine started as a small startup a few years ago. Five people were sitting in the same room, working on one product. They worked as a real Scrum Team swarming all day long. They were nimble and agile in those days. Everyone was engaged in the most crucial work, regardless of the primary specialization. What happened after several years? As the company grew, the number of backlogs increased dramatically. They ended up with 13 “Product Backlogs”: iOS Backlog, Android Backlog, UI/UX backlog, and many more. Homogeneous teams were composed of narrow specialists that worked very efficiently from their perspective. The average Work-In-Progress (WIP) of the whole system increased significantly because developers were focused on starting and finishing their own work in their local backlogs. This amplified the lead time and caused organizational stress. The product organization wasn’t able to deliver value to the market early. Management reacted to this stress in a predictable way; they asked people to work harder. This led to even more backlogs, more Work-In-Progress (WIP), and more organizational stress. The above mentioned dynamic is shown in Figure 2:
Pay attention to the mental model:
The system diagram illustrates how focusing on making people busy impacts the speed of delivering value early in the long-term. More backlogs also mean more dependencies which also impacts value delivery. Let’s investigate this in the next section.
When an organization introduces more backlogs, the teams become less cross-functional. This inevitably leads to dependencies (shown in Figure 3).
The organization starts managing dependencies instead of eliminating them. The more dependencies, the smaller the probability that an end-to-end customer-centric feature will be “Done” in a Sprint. Dependencies affect the lead time, which in turn introduces a new form of organizational stress. Furthermore, teams working from multiple backlogs do not even realize that they are not working on the most critical pieces from a customer’s perspective.
Multiple teams working from multiple backlogs do not realize that they are not working on the most critical pieces from a customer’s perspective!
Why? Let me illustrate this concept with a short story. In 2019 I started working with a product group that was developing a complex banking solution. When I joined them, they already had three cross-functional feature teams working from three separate backlogs. I asked the “Product Owners” and the “Chief Product Owner” to create a single Product Backlog instead. You can see the result below:
It was not evident that work was not distributed evenly until they examined it in one queue. The colors of the stickies represent different parts of the product from the customer’s perspective. Having three backlogs meant that teams were sub-optimizing the whole while working on less critical features. If we look at the resulting system diagram, we can see three reinforcing loops R2, R3, R4 that create a “Fixes That Backfire” archetype with B1 (shown in Figure 5):
The central theme of the pattern “Fixes That Backfire” is that people make a reasonable attempt to remedy an unwanted situation. Still, after the ‘fix’, the problem comes back – sometimes in a different form – often more prominently than before. Doing more of the same actions just worsens the situation. More backlogs lead to bigger problem, longer lead time, and more organizational stress.
Now let’s see how to redesign the system to optimize value delivery instead of making people busy.
As I mentioned before, the fundamental problem in a complex environment is uneven distribution of work.
Scrum (n): A framework within which people can address complex adaptive problems, while productively and creatively delivering products of the highest possible value. – The Scrum Guide
You can consider optimizing value strategy in the context of two steps:
Unfortunately, working from a single queue of requirements creates a painful gap in knowledge. The bigger the skill gap, the bigger the need for developers to help others to acquire new skills. But this strategy pays off after some time and leads to the development of multi-functional specialists and Agility. Look at Figure 6:
Pay attention to the mental models:
The essence of Scrum is a small team of people. The individual team is highly flexible and adaptive. – The Scrum Guide
Frankly, there is nothing new in the concept of multi-functional specialists and cross-functional learning. The origins of Scrum can be found in “The New New Product Development Game” paper, with multilearning being one of the main characteristics of effective teams. Multi-functional specialists were introduced in Toyota a long time ago:
In 1947, we arranged machines in parallel lines or in an L shape and tried having one worker operate three or four machines along the processing route. We encountered strong resistance among the production workers, however, even though there was no increase in work or hours. Our craftsmen did not like the new arrangement that required them to function as multi-skilled operators. They did not like changing from “one operator, one machine” to a system of “one operator, many machines in different processes.” – Taiichi Ohno, The Toyota Production System, 1988
I often hear the argument: “We understand the idea behind that. But still, a deep specialist will be more effective and knowledgeable than a cross-trained one”. And I agree with the argument. But we do not train people to create an efficient resource. Instead, we create a team capable of dealing with bottlenecks by themselves.
We do not train people to create an efficient resource. Instead, we create a team capable of dealing with bottlenecks by themselves!
Remember, when the system is heavily loaded, even a small change in capacity can lead to a significant difference in cycle time. In “Managing the Design Factory” Donald G. Reinertsen writes:
This ability of autonomous teams to align resources to bottlenecks is extremely important because it minimizes queues in the development process. Since these bottlenecks can shift rapidly and unpredictably during a program, the flexibility of team members to work outside of speciality is a critical tool for dealing with such bottlenecks. – D. G. Reinertsen
Unfortunately, many teams prefer applying fixes and follow the resource utilization strategy. This approach is not a good idea if we want to optimize the whole. The quick fix of increasing the number of backlogs has a side effect that weakens the system’s natural ability to implement a more fundamental correction. When a Scrum Team adopts the resource utilization strategy and keeps doing it for some time, it creates a culture of narrow specialists. It takes a lot of effort, leadership support, and patience to overcome the resistance to change from the team, and to apply the fundamental solution instead. If we look at the final system diagram, we can see the reinforcing loop R6 that corresponds to the culture of narrow specialists:
Pay attention to the mental model:
Therefore, with the help of system diagrams, we investigated the implications of learning disability in teams. Quick fixes have long-term consequences. The act of increasing the number of explicit or implicit backlogs spawns lots of problems: more Work-In-Progress, more queues, longer lead times, organizational stress, less delivered value. The fundamental solution is multi-functional learning.
Multi-Functional Learning is the Heart of Agility!
There are many options for dealing with the situation when the Scrum Team(s) are used to work in the “make people busy” mode. Here are some of them:
In the next article, we shall dive deeper into tips and tricks for enabling multi-functional learning and increasing Agility.
In complex environments, work is never distributed evenly in Sprints. When developers are working on customer-centric Product Backlog Items, they experience a knowledge gap. There are two primary responses to this challenge. The first is to follow the path of resource utilization and to increase the number of implicit or explicit backlogs. Developers become individually more efficient, but at the cost of sub-optimizing the whole system. The solution is to respect the order of one Product Backlog by helping others and embracing multi-functional learning. Over time this strategy creates a flexible team. You train people to deal with bottlenecks. The culture of narrow specialists stays in the way of multi-functional learning. There are many ways to fight this culture and to preserve the long-term strategy. Getting teams to work continuously in pairing, mob-programming and swarming modes is one of the most effective approaches for this.
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