How do you handle if the developer is leaving and there is no plan to hire or replace the team member ?
This is an impediment and when brought up to stakeholders they mentioned that hiring doesn’t help as the learning curve would not be fast when the release needs to be done in 2 months.
Pulling the other team member from a different product team is one option however it’s not sustainable long term …
Work with PO to negotiate scope but PO is adamant that he wants all the scope to be delivered .
How to handle this scenario?
You don’t say what your role is in the team, however you seem to be acting as a project manager trying to negotiate on scope and time/cost with the stakeholders and product owner.
That’s probably not very helpful. If you are a Scrum Master, you job is to optimise delivery, and highlight issues. You don’t own those issues. If anything, the hard choices are faced by the PO and the organisation, not you.
I tend to
– build a probabilistic forecast based on the teams historical delivery in points/stories
– create a “stacked column” chart of the remaining work in each feature
– overlay these two and present the data
That’s it. This is how much stuff the team can deliver (min and max) over the next N sprints. This is how much we have left to do. These things don’t fit. What would you like to do?
If you want to get sophisticated model the team’s reduced capacity at the point at which the person leaves, based on the data.
Facts are friends.
Present the facts, and ask what we – as an organisation – want to do about them. If they start down the “work harder you dogs” line then it’s just a question of highlighting that increases the risk that more staff will leave.
So – stop negotiating, start collaborating. Get the key individuals together and identify what as a team, you are going to do, without throwing the developers under the bus.
You have failed to manage key person risk – and there’s a certainly a discussion to be had there – but that’s the past, not the future. Arguing over accountability won’t help the customer, and is best left for another day.
There are techniques you can use like ” evaporating clouds” to explore problems where you have a conflict which might help (Check out Clarke Ching’s excellent book Corkscrew Solutions on this), however you need to
– stop blamestorming
– face the facts
– act
Sorry if this sounds tough, but at a point it’s about shifting the perspective the organisation has, and learning…