Scrum and Organizational Structure

Question

I am working in a company that wants to migrate their development process to Scrum.

The company did not have much of a development process up to now but had well organised sales and marketing departments.

At the same time the company wants to start an R&D department in the East Coast from scratch (currently there is an R&D dept in the West Coast).

The question I 've been asked is to propose a new organizational structure for the company that will encompass the new development team in the east coast and foster development in the company.

The company works in different projects at the same time, (possibly unrelated) and plans to have around 30 developers in the near future.

I proposed a scheme which is project based, where each project consists of the basic Scrum roles (Product owner, Scrum Master, and Development Team).

Teams WILL be spread across sites, with some of the members in the East coast and some of them in the West coast. One reason is that for some projects there is prior knowledge of existing platforms required and this knowledge is in the West Coast whereas the main development workforce will be in the East Coast. Scrum master will be located at the site were the majority of the development workforce of the project will be.

I expect this to gradually change as development efforts are moved in the East coast, but this will not take place immediately.

Projects will be coordinated by a person that assigns priorities to projects and can move people from one team to another (The scrum of scrum master).

I believe that it is incredibly risky to do all of this things at once but this is a decision I cannot alter.

The questions I have are the following:

• Do you think the above setup is reasonable? If not what do you think are the downsides
• In terms of HR management, who should be responsible and what would be his/her role in the chart. For example, who should decide on hiring/letting staff, making staff appraisals? Will a separate manager be required? where does he lie in the whole picture?
• I think a separate manager will be required in the East coast dealing with day-to-day activities. (Requests for leave? appraisals? anything a typical PM would do?). How do you think will be the best way to handle this?

Answer 1

I don't think there is much flaws in process which you mentioned. My suggestion is, as you said team should not have 30 members. Ideally in Scrum, the team should be 7 to 9 members. It includes dev team, testers, scrum master and product owner. I would suggest to divide your team to smaller units and have a Business Analyst who manages the team goals, Scrum Master to ensure the team follows process, (Business Analyst and Scrum Master can be same person), Project Manager to ensure the project goals are met and a HR to managing resource, leave, appraisals etc.

You should have separate person as HR to take care of hiring, appraisals, leave management, employee welfare, motivation etc.

It would be better to have separate managers in East coast and West coast.

If you need any clarification in roles and responsiblities or process of Scrum, please refer

http://agileevangelists.wordpress.com/2014/01/23/intro-on-agile-scrum/