dimanche 29 mai 2011

Scrum & Outsourcing

Agile development is a fashion nowadays. Anyone one who wants to shine in a professional discussion adds SCRUM keyword between his words. For making things short, Scrum is a very dynamic and flexible way of  work organization in order to conduct a project. In scrum we privilege persons and interaction over processes, working products over heavy documentation, client collaboration and trust over negotiation and contracts, and finally flexibility over planning.
In big companies, sometimes there is a need to reinforce scrum teams with external persons, which is known as technical assistance (outsourcing). This is a very risky strategy if it is not well managed and understood.
As said before, scrum is highly dependent on interaction among team members, and on their spirit of initiative and proposition. If the external members aren't motivated enough, scrum can be a nightmare for the project. Many reasons are possible of this lack of motivation: The external member intervene for a short period of time, he doesn't have a good vision of the project, the scrum master hides a lot of information considered important to his company... The problem with scrum is that documentation isn't present in abundance. It means that scopes and rules of work aren't well defined and in case of problems it is not easy to contractually repair the damage. When trust is not well present, hell of mutual accusations threatens the success of the project.

Scrum's name is inspired by Rugby. It is a team game. If you aren't sure about the external people you want to integrate in your team better not use them and work harder in the smaller team, or otherwise work in the standard V-model process.

Achraf

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