The Doctor is "In" - Using the Office Hours Concept to Make Limited Resources Most Effective
Typically, scrum teams work best when team members are 100% allocated to the team. But what about team members that can’t be? What about teams that don’t have a member from a functional area like User Experience or TechPubs? This experience report examines how salesforce.com has handled: sharing resources between teams, and filling in gaps when a functional expert is missing from a team. Salesforce.com uses an “Office Hours” program for teams to utilize the expertise of functional experts (like writers and designers) when those experts aren’t on the team.
Salesforce.com’s Technology organization transitioned over 30 product teams from a waterfall development process to an agile development process. After this transition, it was evident that shared resources, such as user experience and product documentation professionals, could not support as many teams as they had in the past using a waterfall process. As a result, shared resources were assigned to fewer teams, which left some teams without designated team members for product documentation and user experience. This experience report highlights how salesforce.com has adopted the concept of “Office Hours” in order to make these limited, shared resources most effective and to support teams that do not have a designated resource for user experience or product documentation.
Introduction to salesforce.com’s Development Services - brief overview of the “shared resources” problem for Tech Pubs, User Experience, and System Testing
How many teams is too many? - Team member-to-scrum team ratios we’ve developed and why
What to do if you don’t have enough people? - The Office Hours concept and how it works, including the mechanics of holding Office Hours, the timing of Office Hours, the prioritization process of which scrum teams have to use Office Hours vs. getting a dedicated team member. We’ll also talk about how well it does or doesn’t work for different functional groups like Tech Pubs, User Experience, and System Testing.