I'm the Scrum Master on a project at the moment, and sometimes getting people to understand the concept of "Team" is very difficult. We just had a new member added to the team who was also a new hire for the company we're working for. At the beginning of the iteration, he signed up for a full work load, insisting that the holidays wouldn't impact him at all. For the first week, things were o.k. (although he only had 1 day of burn for the five days of work), but then after that, he just disappears! He says he's working, but there are no check ins, he's missing every stand-up, doesn't respond to e-mails, etc.
I can't imagine performing so poorly during the first month of employment at a company! Its a sure fire way to get fired.
The rest of the team did just what they were supposed to. As soon as the majority of the team came back from vacation, with only a little prompting, they realized that there was no way the developer could complete what he had signed up for and they reallocated what he was working on (some had burned faster than what we planned), and moved out the remainder to the next iteration. No complaining, no focusing on that team member, just a desire to get as much functionality completed by the end of the iteration as possible.
Now, if we can only get the new member to understand how badly he hurt the team by his behaviors . . .
Technorati Tags:
Scrum,
team,
work