How many times have you been on an Agile team where there are team members that are not fully allocated to the iteration/Sprint? Has it been frustrating? Do you see it as an impediment? but most importantly, how do you deal with such situation?
Every Agile implementation and in every organization you will run into this situation. Certain team members that are either shared across multiple teams, or having to work on support items while in the middle of a sprint/iteration, or there is this person that everyone needs on the team because there is only one of him in the organization – in my situation this is the integration/middle-ware guru. Well, you are not alone. We have all been faced with such situation.
It is very critical to highlight the risk associated with this practice, but more importantly you will need to adjust the Sprint/iteration capacity at the time of sprint planning accordingly. Let’s take an example to illustrate:
You have a team of 5 people, where 2 people are allocated to work on support tickets or other plans, assuming two week iterations and average velocity of 50 points.
- Calculate average velocity per team member:
With 50 points velocity, average velocity per team members is 50/5 = 10 Story points.
- Calculate the average time spent on previous iteration on support work. let’s assume 20% for one team member (80% remaining for sprint work) and 40% (60% remaining for sprint work) for the other team member.
- Calculate the new velocity for team members:
Total Velocity = 10 + 10 +10 + (10*80%) + (10*60%)
Total Velocity = 10 + 10 + 10 + 8 + 6 = 42 story points.
Therefore, during sprint planning ScrumMaster will work with the team to only commit to 42 story points instead of 50.
I have also encountered teams where they use hours instead of story points. in such situation, you will use number of hours allocated to the iteration instead of story points.
Even though shared team members is not a recommended practice in Agile, but it is widely spread and you will have to deal with it sooner or later. I hope such article helped you deal with such situation.
