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When multiple teams are working together on a project, there are many cross-team issues and dependencies that need to be resolved. Significant organizational change is generally needed to support agile development; often this change is more than one team can create on their own.
A Scrum of Scrums is a scrum team made up of representatives from each of several other teams. Usually the representatives are the ScrumMasters for each team, although sometimes technical leaders and product owners also participate. An Uber ScrumMaster acts as the facilitator for the Scrum of Scrums.
Just like a regular scrum team, the Scrum of Scrums works iteratively to deliver value in the form of removed organizational obstacles. Usually this group’s meetings lag just behind the regular Scrum meetings. For example, if the Scrum teams have their daily meeting at 9AM, the Scrum of Scrums might meet at 9:15AM.
Some tips to make this group successful:
1. Remove any unintentional or intentional hierarchy or power associated with this meeting. (This is only a role!)
2. Remind people of the intent and purpose: to remove escalated obstacles or resolve dependencies between teams
3. Have the SOS team create a backlog to work through iteratively
4. Engage the team in a mission/value statement exercise for clarity when stuck
5. For Daily Scrum of Scrums Meetings, stick to the point and stay after to solve problems, just like in the other daily meetings
6. Bring an expert with you or send him in your place if he is better equipped to solve the problem; it’s all about waste and obstacle eradication
7. Make SOS progress visible to the organization via demos
8. Hold retrospectives
9. Don’t give SOS power to inflict decisions on other teams
Consider this pattern when:
- You have multiple interdependent agile teams
- You have a large backlog of organizational impediments
- You are transitioning to Agile development
