The Pet Project Team

Agile Team challenge 5 — How to deal with a cunning team that claims too much power

In the five 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 the last common challenge that I listed, a pet project team.

These are a bit rarer than the previous challenges I’ve described, but especially if you work in multiple environments over time, odds are that you will run into the following challenge.

A very experienced development team, that knows all the ins and outs of Scrum/Agile, makes very, very good use of their knowledge and experience. They put pressure on the Product Owner by emphasizing all the time that the team decides on how things are realized and that quality is of the utmost importance, and that, therefore, their “pet projects” need to be finished first. In short, the team claims too much power and doesn’t listen well enough to the wishes of the customers, entering through the Product Owner. All speed is eliminated.

As I said, you will not encounter this tension in just any team. The members of a team that fits this description are very intelligent and really know how to do their job. They were smart…