Its in scrum basics that scrum teams
are cross functional. However, its not that as soon as scrum teams are formed
the team members lose their identities of core competencies and take the badge
of scrum team member.
Its one of the pep talks which any
scrum master gives to the scrum team and its that scrum team is cross functional.
However, ever wondered why would a .net developer be ready to start doing
testing? Why would an ABAP developer start learning CQ? Why would a
documentation expert share his / her bread and butter skill with someone else?
Even to start with scrum isn’t a cake
walk and you should be more than willing to open a can of worms and clean it
up. To properly make a scrum team cross functional and empower them too in this
process, it requires a kind of patience for the ‘slave leader scrum master’.
Reality 1 : You will face resistance
from team to become cross functional and actually start delivering. A
supportive organization culture and grooming period to learn and to make
mistakes is a pre-requisite.
Reality 2 : Not every one is going to
be onboarded on day 1 and some might never be onboarded. You will have to
actually make them win to get their commitment on cross functional tasks.
Reality 3 : Plan for smaller battles.
For eg : you might not be able to make a dot net developer start writing code
in java. However, they could start writing documentations. Similarly, giving
opportunity for doc expert to share his knowledge with team is going to get you
better support than to share tasks.
Reality 4 : Reward the cross
functional team members rather than punish the ones not ready for the same as
it might scare them away.
