As stated in the scrum guide a team is “is a cohesive unit of professionals focused on one objective at a time, the Product Goal[1]”. But people working together on the same goal does not make a team in a sense of effective collaboration. To get a team to a certain level if effectiveness it needs more. The team member should know what everybody is able to do and what team members can’t do. They should have trust in a sense that everybody is able to deliver value for the team. It needs knowledge about the preferred way of communication and knowledge what drives team member to perform in a sustainable way. And to get everything that is needed it needs foremost stability in these cohesive unit of professionals. If team members are exchanging the stability is lost and it needs time for everybody to get back to trust, knowledge and understanding of each other.
Nevertheless, it is in the nature of teams that team members might leave the team, while others are going to join. In the recent months I have I’ve seen a bunch of changes on the organisational level of teams as well as constant changes within scrum teams. In this article I’ll focus on the challenges of onboarding new development member in a scrum team and how the team tackled these challenges based on the five scrum values Commitment, Focus, Openness, Respect, and Courage[2].
Tackle the challenge
The biggest challenge for new team members is within the past. New team members did not participate in all the different discussions and decisions the rest of the team did to continuously improve themselves. All the little team rules that came up the last couple of months are not aware for the team rookies. Additionally, the team has built up some gut feeling about their own processes like quality assurance, the need of pair programming on certain topics or the estimation of story points. Each inexperience is small but together they sum up to some bigger friction.
Courage
“The Scrum Team members have the courage to do the right thing, to work on tough problems”
Onboarding a new colleague can be a tough problem. So many things to teach, and you want to get the team back to performance as soon as possible. Even if your team has been very stable in the past (Congratulations !), any of the team members has been in the position of being the rookie in the past. Hence the team can help a lot regarding the onboarding plan. The team should have the confidence and the courage that they know best what is needed. Give them time in advance and they will to the right thing to have the new members as part of the team as quickly as possible.
Commitment
“The Scrum Team commits to achieving its goals and to supporting each other.”
Talking about commitment to a goal people tend to think at the sprint goal and delivering value in a sprint. You should not lose sight of delivering value, but the value might get a little smaller while you onboard new colleagues. The team still commits on their goal which is to get the team member on board. This might not deliver value to the product you develop directly but a commitment to get everybody on board is a commitment to value in the long run (even for your stakeholders).
Focus
“Their primary focus is on the work of the Sprint to make the best possible progress toward these goals”
You got your team to have the courage to make a decision about the onboarding plan themselves, and you got the commitment that the onboarding is part of the sprint delivers some value for your stakeholders. As you might have already experienced stakeholder will try to get some pressure on the team and on their team members as well to deliver the task that they like to see with priority. This is regardless of the onboarding situation. But especially during the onboarding it needs a lot of focus on the task of getting the new team member into the team. The onboarding should be the task with highest priority within a sprint and everybody needs to focus on achieving this task soon. There is no possibility to postpone the onboarding to a later date.
Openness
“The Scrum Team and its stakeholders are open about the work and the challenges”
Onboarding is not a task as any other task. The people to onboard need a different attention than a software change. The value added cannot be determined as easy as for a software change and additionally you might react even more agile with people than you do with software. Nevertheless, it would be best to be open about the change in the team, the impact on the next sprints and the team’s velocity. Tell your stakeholder about the onboarding and make the effort it takes to gain domain knowledge and team process transparent to everybody.
This is where the team members need to change their focus from developing and start focus on onboarding the new colleagues.
Respect
“Scrum Team members respect each other to be capable, independent people, and are respected as such by the people with whom they work.”
Respecting other people seems to be obvious to most people. Nevertheless, it cannot be emphasized often enough. The team should be convinced that the new member will be a possibility to improve the team even more. Make sure that everybody is aware of the possible team backdrop in the short run, as it needs some effort for the onboarding. If team members know this, and stakeholders are aware there is less pressure and therefore more time to acknowledge the growing diversity of the team.
[1] https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#scrum-team
[2]https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html#scrum-values