Outsourcing: Scrum Best Practices

Outsourcing has long been a tool for reducing costs. Scrum changes the economics of outsourcing and helps build a strong business case for keeping development at home. If you can achieve an eighty-fold improvement in velocity with corresponding quality, why would you spend a shipload of money to set up shop in a country where labor costs are just 70% lower? However, outsourcing is a reality of the global economy and companies are going to do it. So, if you’re going to do it, don’t suck.

Isolated Teams: In this set-up, the remote team has all the same characteristics as a functional Scrum Team. It self-organizes, is self-managed with a Scrum Master and Product owner and has all the skill sets necessary to deliver product every Sprint. What it doesn’t have is a

relationship with the mother ship.

There are plenty of projects where an isolated model can be used but if any part of the organization needs to coordinate with the isolated team, this set-up could be a recipe for disaster. Isolating teams often creates impediments that result in constraints, delays and bugs.

Networked Cross Functional Teams: If project coordination is necessary, a better model is networked teams. In this configuration, individual teams still have their own responsibilities but they are networked through a Scrum of Scrums and are working from the same Backlog. This means that a Chief Product Owner is meeting as often as necessary with Scrum Masters from the remote teams. Also, all developers and designers should feel comfortable talking across teams to insure smooth integration.

Integrated Scrum Teams: The best distribution model for Scrum is to integrate individual team members in multiple locations. Integrated Scrum Teams work from the same Sprint and Product Backlog. The best practice is to have roughly half the team in one location and the other half in another so they are forced to work together across time zones and geography. It is also important to allow teams to form and gel like co-located teams. Bringing the two halves of the team together for the first few Sprints can facilitate this process.

Distribution creates communication and coordination problems but well-designed Daily Scrum meetings and high-bandwidth tools can help close the communication gap. In the beginning bring the teams together for a few sprint so they can find a rhythm, videoconference a lot and use cloud-based tools that the entire organization knows how to operate.

Using the right configuration and tools can really improve productivity and quality of work. Scrum Inc. has helped a number of organizations achieve great results with distributed teams. However, we still recommend only outsourcing when you are looking for a skill set that isn’t readily available in your home market or if the company plans to operate in the market they are outsourcing to.