This is a very common use case (and pain) in Agile organizations. It occurs when you scale all your teams at the same time, but you don’t invest enough in analyzing how the flows of work evolve with respect to the growth of your products and services. But worry not, this is just a matter of maturity.
The first element consists in investing time in coaching team 2. You take the people having expertise in one domain from team 1 and then coach the people in team 2. Coaching is performed over time and also requires a certain level of pedagogy.
The second element is to create training and tutorials. What team 1 creates and can be recognized as repeatable activities, should at the minimum end up in a procedure, kata, etc. And at best, be in a training. One of the tricks I use when I have multiple teams or teammates to train is to gather colleagues in a team meeting, then to record the session so that you have at least some e-learning material. Reaching professional elearning material is another level of expertise though.
The third element is to design a training path using external e-learning platforms such as LinkedIn Learning, Udemy, Pluralsight, etc. Or have a partnership with a training company. At least the eLearning is a good investment in terms of ROI. But still, someone (team lead, HR officer) needs to be managing and planning the training sessions, according to people’s skills and needs of the projects.
The fourth element is to have a documentation system so that team 1 writes down what should be kept in terms of knowledge, like cookbooks, guidelines, how to, user guides, known defects, workarounds, etc. But also, it is expected that team 2 contributes when they go through the documentation. This is a largely collaborative exercise.
Overall, having an organizational knowledge management strategy helps.
Keep in mind that it is not while you run the project that you will solve the dependency issue, this is something to be planned ahead. The best way of handling this is :
- to have good managers (team lead, product owner, project managers) who handle capacity forecast correctly
- have a solution architecture practice which will spot miles ahead which skills are required for the construction of features
- Have your company establish a delivery methodology like SAFe, or like ING’s “One Agile Way of Working”.
I invite you to check also Team Topologies, a practice that addresses these topics. It recommends identifying teams’ archetypes and defining collaboration and communication patterns.
Should you need more specific details, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn (https://lu.linkedin.com/in/yhuchard)
