Community Of Practice

Spotify Scaled Agile Case-Study – Lessons For Smaller Teams

A while back, Henrik Kniberg published an excellent case study on Scaling Agile @ Spotify. Though case study is specific to Agile scaling experiences at Spotify, some practices are equally important for smaller teams as well. This post tries to capture the essence from smaller team’s perspective.

Break Silos

A lot of organizations still works in functional silos.

For instance, in a bank, there may be one team for web banking, another team for home-loans and yet another one for mainframe based core-banking. Business features however in general cut across all these teams.

Drive Innovation By Creating Communities of Practice

by Avienaash Shiralige 3 Comments

In my last post, I discussed about sustainable pace and how nation and organisation culture comes in its way. One of the issues often found is people on scrum teams being too focussed and busy on the projects and having no time for their own research, self-study, upgrading themselves on new things etc. This leads to lesser learnings from outside world and limits the growth of people.

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don’t be afraid to fail.

be afraid not to try.

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Introducing or rather planning slack time on the team gives free time for people to work on their pet projects. Different organisations have done it differently, like:

Giving a break between sprints
Following 80/20 principle, 20% free time for people to think and work on their interest
One free day in a month
Having a small time reserved every sprint