Work Cells

Anti-Pattern 

The organization is willing to adopt scrum as methodology but didn't want to properly reorganize resource in work cell. They may trying to keep a departmental organization but want to go Agile.

This can be cause from the following factors:

1) Social: People in charge of a department didn't want to lose their control or risking to have their social status or role changed.

2) Tools & practices: Tool for capturing metrics and managing project may not be adapted with the workflow of self-organizing work cell. People are unwilling to change or/and learn new tools and practices.

3) Risk: A change in the organization mean a certain risk for ongoing project. Instead of using a pilot project with incremental changes, the organization have tried an unsuccessful transition while keeping the old structure.

You need a certain level of flexibility inside an Agile work cell to be able to sustain the variability of activities without generating too much waste . Flexibility is obtain via mentorship, training and a continuous knowledge transfer dynamic through the members of the workcell. If you preassigned your task, you break this dynamic.

Aiming for cross-functional team and multi-line specialist is the best way to avoid the following anti-pattern.

Component Cells

On the opposition of a cross-functional teams, cells are organized by department. Most of the advantage of an agile workflow are lost. Transportation cost and WIP is very high. Focus is strictly on task completion. External quality is usually low.

Volatile Cell

Time boxed is not respected, the team is not properly protected during the iteration. Members of the cell are not stable, some got ejected during the iteration. Others are not available when needed since they are not dedicated to the iteration.

Frequent when an activity is owned by a single specialist and this activity is present in many work cell.

As resources get ejected and new resources appear, task may also frequently change or get blocked during the iteration

Team velocity metric can't be trusted, Waste of delay is high.

Overweight Cell

This is often used as a false remedy to the Volatile Cell anti-pattern.

We build a cell from most of the group resources to avoid volatility.

The iteration planning include a large list of features. Team cohesion is lost since a large group can't be focused together on a small set of feature. Usually focus fall from task quality to task completion. (can lead to Preassigned cell)

Overweight cell increase the overall complexity thus reducing feedback and continuous improvement. Generate a lot of WIP. Hindered the control of overproduction waste.


Preassigned Cell

Some team will preassign all of the known tasks during iteration planning.

This anti pattern artificially create a critical path that prevent using pulling. Flexibility is highly reduced, Knowledge transfer is hindered.  

When a critical path appear, usually time padding appear as well to reduce the risk of disrupting the chain.

Task completion become more important than feature completion thus resulting in more WIP. Focus fall from task quality to task completion.

Frequently encountered with Unstable Cell and Overweight Cell