Shared Services Teams
Why They Don’t Work with Agility
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One of my clients wants to use shared services teams as they start their agile transformation.
Their developers work on a product for months and years at a time.
However, the testers and UI people are part of pools of people.
The organization calls these testers and UI people shared services.
Shared service-thinking denies the reality of effective product development:
A cross-functional team learns together as they develop the product.
Without that cross-functional team, the people, product, and organization suffer in various ways:
- Neither the testers nor the UI people ever learn everything they need to about a product.
- The developers don’t realize what the testers or UI people need to be effective.
- Everyone waits for other people. Developers wait for UI people. The testers — when they finally get to work on the product — wait for developers to…
