Assigning the business people

Yesterday, we took yet another step in our slow transition towards a more agile software development. As I’ve explained earlier, we use Team Foundation Server‘s work item tracking with the Scrum for Team System work item template and the Scrum Dashboard from EPIServer for daily updates. But with us I mean the developers, not the business people and not the acceptance testers.

But the other day, one of the business responsible started asking questions concerning who’s, and what’s and when’s in a project where I’m not exactly involved but where I function as an agile coach. First, I started looking myself, and then realized what I was doing. So, instead, I asked him to look for himself. Now, you agile warriors might argue that if we’d been using post-its he could have gone and looked for himself. But he works in Norway, so that is easier said than done when our developers are in Sweden.

I gave him a crash course in how he could use the scrum dashboard (read only rights) and he was very happy to see that he could now look for himself.

It was less than an hour when another person approached me, asking about the same question. This guy is both an orderer and a supplier of material. Since he’s our interaction responsible, developers are often dependent on him supplying them with sketches and suggestions. First I considered just giving him the same read-only rights but then I realized that he should also be considered part of the team. One of our team members had registered an impediment which stated that he was waiting for material from this guy. So, I gave him some read and write rights instead and told the guys that from now on they should assign him on tasks and impediments like they do with each other. This became a step towards integrating the business people into the development teams and processes.

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