Team Sauron’s Shapeshift: Adapting to Forge Success

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Photo by Alessandra Verre on Unsplash

This article was co-written by Sabrina Love.

Meet Team Sauron. Sauron is a Scrum Team working at Magnum Opus, a company that creates biometric security machines. This team specifically is creating facial recognition software with highly sophisticated cameras. The team consists of the following people:

Product Owner — Ruben Blackstone
Scrum Master — Rafaela Higgins
Developers — John Doe, Joanna Doe, Anna Nonimous, No Wan Noes, Patty Kong

They have successfully delivered increments for 15 Sprints, but they have been struggling in the last three Sprints.

In the refinement session, the team runs into the same issues they had in the previous Sprints: they don’t have the right skills to address some of the upcoming work having to do with more advanced facial recognition software. Ruben, the Product Owner, is the first to recognize this impending impediment. The team has tried to refine these items before but they always seem to get stuck and ultimately agree to do some research offline. This is the third time they’ve tried, and now it’s becoming increasingly more risky to continue on the current path. Ruben presented the current state of the roadmap and Product Backlog that demonstrates an increasing amount of functionality depending on the missing skill.

Ruben raises his concern to the team; he’s worried that there are missing skills on the team that will prevent him from being able to do his job and maximize the value of the product they are building. A few Sprints have gone by where Ruben has acquiesced to the team’s request to do more research before diving into the advanced features. But they haven’t shown meaningful progress yet, and Ruben’s stakeholders are starting to get antsy. Which means Ruben is starting to get antsy. He needs a solution to this problem before the team runs out of funding. To Ruben’s credit, he presents the problem to the team and gives them the opportunity to figure it out.

The following week, the team reconvenes, and they have some proposals for Ruben: