Can you scrum 3 teams? How about 5?

As my organization reorganizes there has been a realignment of scrum masters. I now have three teams to work with. I’ve read articles about the benefits of working with only one team. And I have spoken with contemporaries about this. After two weeks I’m more than 50% confident I can kind of scrum three teams. It depends on your definition.

Artwork from ScrumAlliance 2017 San Diego Gathering

Each team size is 5 developers, 1 PO and 1 SM.  We are data warehouse BI shop. So in a perfect world we have 3 ETL, 1 Presentation layer and 1 QA as developers. And the developers are cross training so if a sprint requires a different skill mix we can accommodate that. Note that the team is not that large.

Under basic scrum math for a 2 week sprint we should have ceremonies that break down like this:

• Backlog refine/groom 8 hours
• Planning 4 hours
• Review 2 hours
• Retro < 2 hours
• Scrums (DSU) 4 hours

That’s only 60 hours over 2 weeks. So in theory it can be done.

But let’s add more into the equation. All three teams start and end sprints on the same schedule. One of my contemporaries who is well versed in our environment immediately pointed out the impossibility of one person conducting the ceremonies properly. All three teams end on Thursday (install) and close out the current sprint and start the next sprint on Friday. (It should be noted here  that there really is not much need for a DSU on Friday unless there is problems from the release that needs to be addressed. But that would have precluded the person(s) from attending the DSU anyway if that person had to fix production.) So the first thing to go is the DSU on Friday except for maybe a quick recap if there were any problems with the release. In reality I receive emails as the does the rest of the team about the status so all of us know if there is any problems.

If you are following the math on Friday I have 3 Reviews, 3 Retros and at least 3 partial Planning ceremonies. Using only half of the planning time that is still an 18 hour day. Interestingly, 2 jobs ago I was in a similar environment (as a dev team member not a scrum master). And they solved the problem by putting the 3 teams together in a 4 – 5 hour planning session Friday afternoons. But those 3 teams all worked on the same web application and needed to coordinate their development stories. As you are probably realizing is that there is some flexibility. Maybe the word I’m looking for is agile.

Hotel view ScrumAlliance 2017 San Diego Gathering

Since putting the 3 teams in a room together for planning on Friday is not an option, I need a different solution. Refinement/grooming is in two 4 hour sessions each week of the sprint. Those refine/groom sessions need to be spread out or else I’m back into a 12 hour day. How we resolved it was  that a stakeholder (you know what I am talking about) and I take turns on that Friday in the different team ceremonies. This has positive and negative elements. The positive is we rotate teams and then get together and compare notes on what each of us has learned. The different perspectives is very helpful. And we are collaborative on ideas to test on how to make the teams better.

The negative is that the stakeholder is the dev team’s manager. So you can see the obvious conflict of interest during a retro for a team member to speak out on a problem if it about an action of the stakeholder. So far that has not been a problem. This particular stakeholder has had a lot of experience in using Scrum and Kanban so their input is valuable. We have discussed that when our teams and our processes become more mature we will probably switch to Kanban.

The next question is if I can take on the other two teams for a total of 5 teams? The math just doesn’t work unless we scrum by committee. If we choose the “by committee” option, then by definition I am not scrumming all five teams. Because the math is now a total hours to 100 hours for 2 weeks of just ceremonies. If scrum master was only ceremonies our lives would be much easier. I will definitely need at least one other scrum master. Fortunately we have another scrum master.

How many teams can you do?

UPDATE: 05/25/2017

I am almost at the end of my first sprint over 3 teams. And it is apparent that I can’t scrum 3 teams at once with their current level of scum mastery. Fortunately I have their manager who is an Agile advocate to spread out the work over each sprint. We meet regularly to plan how to move them up the mastery scale.On a scale of 1 to 10, one team is a 6-7 the other two are 3’s.

Once they all get to 7-10 range I won’t have to attend all the ceremonies. I should be able to see if they are going to meet thier commitments (sprint goal) based upon metrics I am putting together now. But that is another story. If I can attend a couple DSU’s each week for each team I should get a feeling if there are any issues that would preclude the team from meeting the sprint goal. Then if I can spread out the sprint reviews, retros and first plannings I should be able to see how they are working on their own. This will give me the information I need to reinforce and introduce new Scrum/Agile ideas to keep things fresh.