The Mixed Team

Agile Team challenge 3 — How to deal with a team that consists of very experienced and very inexperienced members

In three previous articles, I’ve described, from my own and colleagues’ experience, five common challenges that Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches face on a regular basis in everyday customer environments. This week, I’ll be handling challenge number three, a mixed team.

You might recognize the following common challenge from your own work environment.

The team disagrees about the application of Scrum. There are very experienced team members that tend to move towards Kanban, and there are team members willing to learn, but who are, as of yet, too inexperienced to do things right.

This sort of team is typically found in environments that are pretty new to an agile way of working and where, at the same time, they’ve hired experienced external people to mix in the teams. The basic assumption, made by the organization, is usually that the experienced hired help will both teach the novice team members how to work in an agile way correctly, and, additionally, add a lot of development power to the team.

How do you deal with this situation as a Scrum Master or Agile Coach? The organization would want the team to work as one united team. But…