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We are a team of around 12 developers (2 leads / 3 mid level /5 juniors / 2 designers) and we are planning to have following teams.

We are into web development.

  1. R&D Team - Team that will do POC for third party integration or any complex features
  2. Regular Dev Team - Team that will work on regular tasks that are part of scrum. They may even get KT from R&D for integrations/complex developments
  3. Production support team - Production support like customer queries and bug fixing.

How do we plan the resources for each team such that no one should feel demoralized for the task assigned?

E.g., a guy who does PROD support shouldn't feel inferior that he did not get a chance to work on R&D.

We follow Agile with 2 weeks scrum. We would like to accommodate every one and give opportunities for them to grow. Kindly help us in organizing the team effectively.

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  • I have a few ideas, but I'd need more information. Does your "R&D Team" actually build third-party integrations? Is there a reason why the production support team is split from the development team?
    – Thomas Owens
    Commented Dec 11, 2020 at 13:05
  • @ThomasOwens Thanks. Here R&D meant to find technical solutions(with or without third party systems) for any business problems. E.g. suggest and help integrating IdentityServer if the client is looking for centralized Authentication.. something like this... Reg PROD support, still the product hasn't matured to the level where we can have separate support team. Down the line we will have a separate support team but not in near future.
    – Gopi
    Commented Dec 11, 2020 at 13:55
  • How many products do you have? Since you mention web development, is it a SaaS solution? Since you talk about client integrations, is it multitenant?
    – Thomas Owens
    Commented Dec 11, 2020 at 14:43
  • Do team members get any input in what they'd like to do? If R&D is highly sought after, maybe you could balance that out by requiring them to rotate into support once in a while.
    – Llewellyn
    Commented Dec 11, 2020 at 19:35
  • @ThomasOwens, yes it is Saas and multitenant. Our team deals with only one product though we have lot of other products across organization
    – Gopi
    Commented Dec 14, 2020 at 5:56

1 Answer 1

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I'm curious as to why you're splitting into three teams rather than 2.

On the surface, I see two types of work: ongoing product work and integrations.

The ongoing product development includes proofs-of-concept for complex features, "regular tasks", and production support. If you have a sufficiently high-quality product, the vast majority of this work can be handled in a regular cadence. If you have frequent high priority interrupts, you may need to look at resolving those before you can fit into a regular planning cadence.

Third-party integrations are a different beast. They are often far more well-defined and have less uncertainty, ambiguity, and variability than product development. A different funding model and a different development life cycle are best suited to this type of work.

Depending on the architecture of your system and the level of demand for each type of work, it may be possible to shift some work between these two teams. Specifically, I'd want to understand more about the projected work related to third-party integrations and production support.

If you really wanted to be more accommodating, I'd potentially even look at moving away from Scrum. Some of the concepts may be useful, but there are likely ways to form stable teams around particular bodies of work that are changing. Again, following a two-team model, one team could be working on proof-of-concept work and production support for a month or two while the other team is doing product development, perhaps based on POC work that they did the last cycle.

I think there are plenty of options, but settling on 3 teams and the way you've organized the proposal is too constraining. With a bit more of an open mind, I think there are some good options that keep people engaged. This may be a good opportunity to let the individuals self-organize around the two leads and develop a way of working that supports the business as well as their individual needs.

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  • Thanks for sharing your input.
    – Gopi
    Commented Dec 14, 2020 at 5:59

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