New Job New Scrum Team?
So I just started a new role at a fortune 500 biotechnology firm as a Scrum Master. Before this I was a Scrum Master in higher education and supported three IT teams that had project work and operational work. Today I was finally able to complete a bulk of my onboarding and LMS trainings and carved out some time to talk to my team for introductions and joined them in their "Daily Status Meeting", yes this is what they call it and yes I know (I will correct this once I train them in Scrum). As I joined the meeting I realized that the team was made up of a mix of employees from my current company and third party representatives working on the project (8 members in total).The setup is just weird to me because the third parties are the ones that are actually doing the work. The team of 8 is more of the coordination piece because the PO is technically a project manager and so are the rest of the team. Everyone essentially does coordination work. I took a look at the backlog and its just a copy and paste of a very detailed project plan from MS Project migrated to Jira broken up into phases for epics and the stories are the tasks from the project plan. I would assume that the backlog would be should not be the project plan but the actually work that the vendors resources are actually working on. This seems more like they want me to do scrum on a high level overview as opposed to working directly with the development teams.
The break down of the team is like this:
Scrum Master
Product Owner (Who is technically a PM)
Dev: Internal Member, Internal Member, Rep from Vendor 1, Rep from Vendor 1, Rep from Vendor1, Rep from Vendor 2, Rep from Vendor 2, Rep from Vendor 2
All the internal members do not do any kind of coding they are more so . The Reps from the vendors are not contractors they provide a service and it is the use of their technical resources being their software engineers (Most of them are Sr. Managers at their respective firms). Essentially they are consulting firms like PwC of KPMG.
Has anyone been thrown a curve ball like this before? If so what did you do?
What do Sprint outcomes look like here and who cares about them? Where is the value delivery for this biotech fortune 500 and where is its empirical process control?
I'm not sure if i'm understanding you, but you might be getting a little hung up on job titles and contracts.
Forget whether a person has a certain job title, or who pays their salary.
Do you have a Scrum team?
Do the ACCOUNTABILITIES of PO, SM and Developer exist?
Is the team able to self manage, and is it cross functional (able to deliver value in a sprint without outside help?)
If the answer is yes, then the actual HR setup of the org doesn't matter.
If the answer is no, then that is your first job as an SM. Help organize the team and help them to understand Scrum.
If you believe that isn't possible, it might be time to reassess whether you want to take on an accountability you are unable to fulfil.
(I once quit a job 2 weeks in for a similar reason. I did not have a Scrum team, and could not create one. They therefore could not be helped by me)