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When people are speaking about Scrum, it is mostly about changing of existing structure to this method.
Is there some place in this method for new workers who should first "load" tons of information in their heads before they really can start working? And, of course, nobody is there to drill them; they have to find everything out by themselves.
Is there some place in this method for new workers who should first "load" tons of information in their heads before they really can start working?
Scrum is not only a framework for incrementally delivering value it is also an excellent tool for incremental learning.
Teams often start out delivering minimal value as they are going through a sharp learning curve. Many of the teams I have worked with have delivered little in their first 1-2 sprints because they are doing a lot of setup, training and knowledge sharing.
My advice would be to adopt Scrum and immediately start sprinting. Include lots of opportunities for learning in your product backlog and adjust your estimates to take into account the fact that progress will initially be slow.
As an example, it is not unusual for a team to look to do a simple 'hello world' story in their first sprint. This delivers only a tiny amount of value, but gives the team lots of opportunity to get familiar with the domain, get their infrastructure setup and to do the training they need.
Don't be afraid of your lack of knowledge. Use the Scrum retrospectives as an opportunity to learn from your mistakes. Keep inspecting what you have done and adapting your method to make it better.
When looking at a group of workers we see the work it took for them to be in the team, they necessarily had to "load" tons of information in their heads before starting to work, or else what lead you to hire them?
In the original paper describing Scrum, “subtle control” is noted to be one of the six principles.
Selecting the right people for the project team while monitoring shifts in group dynamics and adding or dropping members when necessary. “We would add an older and more conservative member to the team should the balance shift too much toward radicalism,” said a Honda executive. “We carefully pick the project members after long deliberation. We analyze the different personalities to see if they would get along. Most people do get along, thanks to our common set of values.”
You can control who you put together and what's the goal for that team. If the requirement you use to decide placing someone in the team involves going through that documentation initially, so be it. There's also space for training or coaching, if you find that necessary.
There are a couple of things here.
Whenever you get new colleagues on a project, they need to load tons of information in their head in order to become productive. That's just how it is. Nobody hits the ground running. They need to learn the project, the business, the rules, the procedures, policies, etc. You can't work on something you don't understand and expect a successful outcome. This is true for any project, no matter if it's within a Scrum team or not.
So the first thing is that the new people need to be willing to learn. They must put in the effort to learn. Speaking strictly of Scrum, they must of course learn what Scrum is all about, read the guide, read books, make an effort to understand what all the events and artifacts are for, etc. Scrum teams are self-organizing, so everyone must figure out how to do their job. And if they need to learn something to do it, then they learn it.
But the second thing to point out, is that Scrum is all about teams. In a team, you have communication, interaction, collaboration. New colleagues get integrated into the team from the beginning. They are not alone, or by themselves. The team needs to support and help them to become productive. And this is where what you said worries me:
[...] nobody is there to drill them; they have to find everything out by themselves.
Why is that? Do you lock people in a room until they load the information in their heads on their own and only then let them out and put them to work? It doesn't work like that. Not in Scrum, and not anywhere else. When new people join a team, the team changes to include them. Their work adapts to meet this change. The Scrum Master might need to hold trainings, the new colleagues might pair with someone else, they might slowly start contributing things to the project while they get the hang of things, the team velocity might change as the team takes less work in the sprint because they need to offer support for the new colleagues, etc, but eventually people get the hang of things and the team finds a new cadence as they work together in the new team format.
