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Question: Issues with teams that went through restructuring

Last post 01:10 pm January 26, 2021 by roman Shtekelman
3 replies
roman Shtekelman
06:41 pm January 25, 2021

HI, all.

I am an agile coach with few years of experience in Enterprise Agile coaching and hands on scrum master. Yet I wanted to ask a very basic question. In my upcoming interview I will be facing a following question:( the recruiter hinted) Give examples of issues you faced with teams that went through restructuring , ( presumably teams were previoulsy organised around functions ( Test/Dev/BA/etc) and restructured in squads around products or services. I have some examples but wanted to hear from you. Hope it will help someone else who is potentially facing similar questions in the interview or in resolving real life situations, any examples or references to information on the web are welcome. Thank you. 

Ian Mitchell
09:48 pm January 25, 2021

Give examples of issues you faced with teams that went through restructuring

"went through restructuring sounds like an ordeal, as though it was something inflicted on them. If so, that would be an issue right there. Shouldn't teams be coached and mentored to self-organize, so increments of Done work are delivered better?

Mark Adams
11:20 pm January 25, 2021

Are they bringing you on as a trainer, coach or mentor? All the "agile coach" titles I've worked with were trainers. Many organizations have professional coaches but they're embedded in HR. And mentorship can only happen if the mentor has specialized knowledge and skills at the work that the mentoree is doing.

If you fit in the trainer category, they will likely ask you for real world examples of the struggles team members went through as they were being trained on the new, agile, way of working. You'll also get questions around dealing with individuals who let the team do the work, while they sit back and relax.

roman Shtekelman
01:10 pm January 26, 2021

@ Ian  i think the question here is around the restructuring in the sense that say in organisation that is going through agile transformation , some traditional functions are broken down and reorganized around products, so instead of all developers being co-located together with other developers and all testers are co-located with tester and so on, there are now autonomous teams centered around products. this in itself a new paradigm for some people, and can create some issues, ( perhaps BA are used to complete all their analisis in writing and hand it over to developement team for implementation , they are not used to working in short increments and discuss their ideas until all their analysis is 100% complete. They may feel uncomfortable working in this fashion, and my role of agile coach is to resolve this issue and ensure that team feels at ease with new ways of working , )

So I guess I was looking for similar examples from you guys, 

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