I’m a Utopian too

August 19, 2007 by
Filed under: agile 

Jeremy D. Miller says “Call me a Utopian, but I want my teams flat and my team members broad” – then call me one too. He says “over the long run a flat team of generalists with healthy overlap between skill sets will blow the doors off a hierarchical team composed of specialists” and I totally agree, but we’re faced with two problems:

  1. Convincing management of the benefit of investment, because it takes time for people to cross-train and of course there’s always the urgent need to deliver product
  2. Convincing developers that broadening their skills is a good thing – some see it at losing their specialisation as now they’ll have to share the reputation of “expert” with others

An interesting point raised by one of our teams in a recent retrospective, when asked why they thought they out-performed other teams, was that they attributed their success to not having “experts” on the team; this meant they could all get involved, and there was no-one saying “I’ve done this before and here are all the pitfalls” – they just jumped in and got on with it.

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