Five common Agile Team challenges

How to deal with five common challenges in real-life Agile Team situations

From my own and colleagues’ experience, I’ve described five common challenges that Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches face on a regular basis in everyday customer environments. 

I’ve added the particular questions faced by the Scrum Master/Agile Coach, and I’ve addressed the issues from the organization’s point of view in a coaching track.

Do you recognize these challenges from your work environment?

1. While the team is working on the sprint, a manager storms in, rushes to the desk of one team member and demands that the team member quickly arranges something for the manager.

• The question that the Scrum Master/Agile Coach faces is, how does the team respond to this? Taking the roles of Product Owner, Scrum Master, and team member into account, what would we want each role to act like, and how do you coach them to do so?
• From the organization’s perspective, the coaching question would focus on the Agile maturity of the team and its environment.

2. Within the team, there is disagreement on the use of Agile methods. There are multiple team members who would rather work traditionally, diving under, and popping up months later with the end result.

• How do you deal with this as a Scrum Master/Agile Coach? How much are you going to steer, and how much are you going to leave up to the team? And how will you be going about that?
• The organization will ask the coach to align the team with the chosen Agile path.

3. 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.

• How do you, as Scrum Master/Agile Coach, keep both the experienced and the inexperienced team members satisfied?
• The organization would want the team to work as one united team.

4. 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.

• What is the ideal situation you would want to achieve, and how are you going to get there, as a Scrum Master/Agile Coach?
• The organization would want teams to be able to start experiments, in light of the Agile way of working.

5. 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.

• Are you, as Scrum Master/Agile Coach, strong enough to deal with this team, without any formal power?
• The organization needs teams to work within the guardrails of the organization.

In coming articles, we’ll explore the different options a Scrum Master/Agile Coach has, to deal with these five common challenges, one at a time...