The Unbalanced Team

Agile Team challenge 4 — How to deal with a team with great differences in knowledge

In four 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 four, an unbalanced team.

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

There are great differences in knowledge within the team. There are front-enders, back-enders, testers, analysts, and designers, and they never take over each other’s work. They’re not really up for that either and respond negatively to knowledge and work transfer. Meanwhile, sprints are getting in trouble, because of work often being one-sided, depending on the sprint.

You are likely to encounter this sort of team in any organization. Most team members were not born T-shaped, not educated to be T-shaped, and many are not interested to become T-shaped. They got interested in a particular field and specialized in it, like testing, coding, or analysis. Job applications throughout the years have always asked for these specializations as well, so all intrinsic and extrinsic motivators have pointed in one direction only for a very long…