Succeeding with Agile

Cultivate Communities of Practice

On a multi-team project, it is possible for individuals to become isolated, speaking mostly to others on their individual teams. Good ideas are slow to propagate across the organization. Similar functionality is implemented differently by different teams. We put scrum of scrums meetings in place to reduce the impact of some of these problems, but those only go so far. An additional solution and one that is critical to the success of any large Scrum project is the cultivation of communities of practice. Like improvement communities (a special type of community of practice introduced in Chapter 4, “Iterating Toward Agility”), a community of practice is a like-minded or like-skilled group of individuals who voluntarily ...