Part 5: Unleash Your Scrum with Multi-Skilled Professionals — Are We Aimed for Utopian Shiva-Shaped Developers?
The previous article in this series highlighted the evolutionary gift of adaptability and learning, which positions humans as inherently suited for acquiring multiple skills. We discovered that within Scrum environments, multi-skilled professionals yield considerable benefits, both at the organizational level and for products, while offering individuals a sense of fulfillment and accomplishment.
The idea of multi-skilled professionals may sound attractive to many but can easily be discarded as a myth of chasing non-existent all-encompassing Shiva-like developers.
This upcoming article presents a more grounded and realistic view of multi-skilling as a gradual, team-oriented process, emphasizing how even incremental skill enhancements can significantly boost overall team performance.
The underlying strategy is to assemble diverse teams, comprising a spectrum of skill sets from I-shaped to comb-shaped professionals. This mix ensures dynamic teams capable of handling various tasks and challenges together. We move away from pursuing ready-made multi-skilled experts, advocating for an organizational culture promoting continuous learning and organic development of multi-skilled capabilities within teams.
Though it may sound ubiquitous, adopting a multi-skilled mindset is less a final destination and more an ongoing journey. It’s a prerequisite for being able to focus on the most critical features — without it, homing in on what truly matters from a customer and business perspective is challenging.
This paradigm enables teams to deliver potentially shippable increments by the end of each Sprint. It does so by balancing the workload, clearing bottlenecks, and alleviating dependencies, achieved through learning and adaptation. This approach becomes indispensable in a Scrum setting where the skills required to create value are in constant flux. The ability of a team to adapt its skills — both on an individual and a collective level — enables it to navigate evolving requirements and challenges.
If you’re joining me for the first time, I recommend reading the previous parts for context:
Part 1: Unleash Your Scrum with Multi-Skilled Professionals — The History and Background
Part 3: Unleash Your Scrum with Multi-Skilled Professionals — Exploring The Single-Skilled Dynamics
Part 4: Unleash Your Scrum with Multi-Skilled Professionals — Reversing the Dynamics
Chapter 8
What Does Being Multi-Skilled in a Scrum Team Mean?
Addressing Bottlenecks
In complex settings, the workload on a particular specialty often varies, shifting with each iteration and spawning bottlenecks that cap system performance. The Theory of Constraints suggests a system’s efficiency is tethered to its bottleneck. A bottleneck governs a system’s throughput, and efforts to optimize areas outside the bottleneck won’t bear substantial fruit.
The bottleneck could worsen if the rest of the team persists in diving into areas outside the bottleneck. Essentially, while team members may excel in their individual expertise, it could come at a detrimental cost to the team’s collective performance. This approach is counterproductive if the objective is to bolster the overall system performance. Therefore, pinpointing and tackling bottlenecks is vital to optimize the system comprehensively.
The aptitude of autonomous teams to align resources with bottlenecks is key to reducing queues in the development cycle. Since bottlenecks can transition swiftly and unpredictably during a Sprint, the multi-skilled paradigm affords the team the agility to operate beyond their specialties, proving instrumental in navigating such bottlenecks.
The authors of “Creating Agile Organizations” suggest the following strategy to enhance team performance:
- Identify the bottleneck — for instance, by visualizing the workflow over time.
- Boost individual performance at the bottleneck — for instance, by minimizing distractions for experts.
- Empower the team to influence and broaden the bottleneck — for instance, by delegating simpler tasks away from bottleneck experts, enabling them to concentrate on more critical issues.
- Cultivate and hone secondary skills to efficiently aid others.
- Repeat.
Even Small Help Matters
Embarking on the pathway to multi-skilled proficiency necessitates striking a balance between deep specializations and broader skills in adjacent areas. This endeavor is not about diluting core expertise but enhancing it with market-relevant, complementary skills.
It’s realistic to acknowledge that morphing into a deep specialist isn’t a short-term achievement. Yet, during a typical Sprint, the demand for expert understanding is less frequent than a more average comprehension. The objective isn’t to replicate a unique specialist but to alleviate the bottleneck. For instance, a deep specialist can identify areas of work where they would appreciate assistance from others, and they can devise or furnish tools enabling the rest of the team to contribute.
At the outset, devoted learning and knowledge-sharing might decelerate progress. However, the reciprocal effect of teaching and learning leads to expanding the bottleneck, trimming the Work In Progress (WIP) for abbreviated lead times, and elevating performance at the system level. Investing time in assimilating the requisite knowledge and confronting challenges as a team emerges as the alternative to waiting or starting new work.
Learning in Action
Active learning can unfold directly within the workflow by utilizing pairing, mob programming, and swarming as central development techniques. A developer can initiate learning instantly by positioning themselves alongside an expert and engaging in pair work. These approaches also address any perceived decline in quality through continuous feedback loops and reviews, fortified by engineering practices such as automated testing, test-driven development, and emergent architectures.
Types of Developers
Indeed, certain aspects may not be readily addressed through multi-skilled learning. The strategy is to blend different developer types within a team to achieve a skill balance, leveling the workload across team members.
- I-Shaped Developers: Characterized by a deep specialization in a single skill, I-shaped developers are adept at handling work that requires specialist understanding, something beyond the reach of more generalist team members.
- T-Shaped Developers: T-shaped developers stand out with a deep specialization in one area, alongside a broad array of basic skills and experiences in other domains. Although their forte lies in one area, they exhibit the capacity to join forces on tasks beyond their niche, thanks to their broader toolkit. Their versatility brings in smooth communication across specialties and facilitates knowledge sharing across teams. T-shaped developers excel in solving specialized tasks in their expertise while managing less complex tasks across varying domains.
- π-Shaped Developers: Resembling T-shaped developers but with a dual specialization, π-shaped developers are a boon to teams, enabling the completion of more complex tasks with fewer developers. They bring two perspectives, such as development and design, enriching the product with their multifaceted approach.
- Comb-Shaped Developers: Boasting a wide knowledge base with several areas of specialization, comb-shaped developers are collaborative powerhouses. Although their expertise across areas may not be as profound as a singular specialist, their broad knowledge enables cross-collaboration and leveraging of others’ expertise. They seamlessly integrate with multiple functions, making substantial impacts due to their extensive knowledge across multiple domains, enabling them to navigate most of the end-to-end product lifecycle.
Fostering Multi-Skilled Teams
Securing multi-skilled developers during recruitment can pose a challenge; however, crafting an environment that fuels a passion for learning and continuous development emerges as a sound alternative. It pivots on molding teams adept at navigating change and alleviating bottlenecks, where even a minor augmentation in capacity can translate to a substantial reduction in cycle time.
This discussion has revealed that having a team of multi-skilled professionals is far from pursuing the myth of ‘Shiva-shaped’ developers. The approach is utilitarian and grounded; the primary objective is the team’s ability to detect and tackle bottlenecks swiftly.
It emphasizes that even modest contributions from team members with diverse levels of expertise can significantly impact outcomes. In practice, the necessity for specialized, deep mono-skill work occurs less frequently, highlighting the importance of each team member’s contribution, no matter how small.
Learning and enhancing skills can be integrated directly into the workflow through pairing, mobbing, swarming, or guidance and tool sharing by more experienced teammates. This approach creates a long-term, cumulative effect, gradually transforming the team into a more versatile and nimble unit.
While the preference for comb-shaped professionals in recruitment presents a quick and straightforward solution, the reality is that such developers are scarce. A more sustainable strategy involves hiring developers receptive to learning and collaboration and immersing them in an environment conducive to multi-skilled development.
So, we need to take a longer route and invest in creating an environment that supports continuous learning in multiple skills. How do we effectively do that? This question brings us to our next point of exploration: the Influencer Change Model.
The upcoming article will introduce this powerful framework to discover how combining personal, social, and structural motivators in carefully crafted practical experiments can instill multi-skilled growth.
Watch for the forthcoming discussion to guide you through the nuances of implementing the Influence Change Model to grow versatile, responsive, and multi-skilled Scrum teams.
Continue exploring the nuances of multi-skilling in transforming our Scrum practices and elevating our teams to new heights of agility in the next part of the series:
References
- Cesário Oliveira Ramos, Ilia Pavlichenko. Creating Agile Organizations. A Systemic Approach (Addison-Wesley, 2023)
- Jonathan Grupman. What shaped developer are you and are these models helpful?
