Should Agile Teams Work in a Bubble?
by Derek, 8 December 2011 | Agile Teams
This post is from LitheSpeed's LitheBlog: Exploring Lean and Agile by Derek. Click here to see the original post in full.
When a developer posed a question to his Twitter followers a couple of weeks ago about collaboration between agile teams and the business side of the organization, a coworker passed the question my way. Despite the fact that I wasn't able to respond on Twitter right then (ah, travel), the question came at a great time. I had just finished an agile assessment for a client, and left with a fresh perspective on the topic of collaboration and agile team management in general.The specific question was, "Is it healthy for Scrum teams to work in a bubble protected from the business around them? Should collaboration go beyond the team?"
There are two common threads that I see time and time again: What is the goal, and how is that goal communicated? Until these two threads are tied together, true collaboration won't happen. I don't see this as being unique to the world of Scrum. To help illustrate my point, I'll try to use terms from outside of the Scrum community.
