The Quick Brown Fox

This is the third session in my brown bag series. It's not an "agile" topic really, but it was one of the things people requested a session on.  I hoped that people would bring their questions and be willing to discuss them. There were four topics proposed, and some conversation although it was mostly people in the room. Here is the outline:  Day before, set up a Trello board as an option for people to raise topics and added a link to the invitation. Recruited a co-pilot who would watch the WebEx chat and bring up anything that came in through that.  Five minutes before the session, dial in to WebEx, start camera, ensure that screen sharing is set up and the projector is working.  Noon - official start time. 

This is a follow-up to my previous post about getting the offshore and local teams to work together. Armed with the results of my brainstorming session with the team, I met with a representative of the offshore group. I was prepared to bargain, to set limits, to look for a way to help them move forward without jeopardizing my team's sprint backlog.  What I heard, in the course of ten minutes, was that the offshore group only has 2-3 stories every sprint that might benefit from our attention, and that while they do occasionally get stuck, mostly they want up-front guidance and code reviews -- things that can easily be scheduled and shouldn't, if all goes well, take more than a few hours of team from one or two people in a given sprint.  That's what the big deal was? I thought as I jotted notes.  More often than not, I have found that problems are not complicated to resolve if people just take ten minutes to discuss the situation.  

This week something unusual happened: two different people who are not on my team approached to ask for help with impediments. Removing impediments is, of course, one of the chief responsibilities of a Scrum Master. We're supposed to be way-smoothers, facilitating the team's work. One issue was very straight-forward, and was actually given to me because it seemed to involve a piece of documentation (my other job); my boss wasn't sure what the complaint was about or what needed to be done to resolve it. I talked to the Scrum Master who had raised the impediment, together we talked to one of the members of the team affected, and confirmed that the issue had already been automated away and could be closed. Easy-peasy. The other item is ongoing, and I want to document it here, because it's the kind of thorny recurring problem that can't be easily resolved. It has to do with collaboration between one of the local teams and the offshore group. HQ is farming out more a