Scrum and Maturity of the team
By Bachan Anand / Filed under Agile, Collaboration, Scrum, Self Organization / August 10th, 2012
I was recently asked this question:
Doesn’t Agile expect a certain amount of maturity and experience in the team for it to fully succeed?
For instance, an inexperienced or younger team member may not understand what self-organization means, since she has never been exposed to it, and has always followed orders. She may understand it in theory, but to implement it may be outside her capability. Similarly, being open would be a hurdle, since she isn’t used to talking openly about everything and sharing both positives and negatives with the rest of the team.
On the other hand, a person who has experience with working in teams (even if they have never known self organization & openness) may grasp its essence more quickly.
In other words, would the Scrum team fail because new members are unable to fit in?
My response:
I believe that openness, self organization and so on are traits that are inherent in and very native to human beings, and resonate well with everyone, irrespective of whether they have used the words to describe their experience or not. If you expect someone who has less experience to bring to the table the same skills as an experienced person, you may become disappointed. But that in no way means that the new members cannot self organize. I believe that a team with a mix of experienced and new team members will work well within an Agile framework as there will be a lot of learning happening. After all, the Agile mindset thrives in a learning environment. In such an environment I find that the newbies are very excited to learn from the experienced folks, and the experienced folks are excited to share knowledge and to mentor the newbies.
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