Transitioning to fixed teams - insights from a SCRUM master and business owner

In this session a SCRUM master, Evelien Schut, and a business owner, Mieszko Czyzyk, share the lessons learned from transitioning to multidisciplinary, fixed teams within the agency model.

These insights are based on our experience at GoalGorilla, a 25 people Drupal agency based in the Netherlands. They transitioned over a period of several months from a more traditional department structure working on ‘projects’ to a fixed team structure working for clients and building and maintaining products.

This talk is interesting for SCRUM masters and project managers looking for tips on common challenges such as:

• organizing the roles of team members, for example product owners and other non-developers such as designers
• managing agile sprints for different customers, with one team. 
• time and billable rate reporting
• facilitating a distributed team across timezones

For business owners this talk is interesting because it touches upon:

• real world business metrics such as billable rates and turnover per full-time employee
• a vision how this team structure supports a culture of shared responsibility, collaboration and professional excellence
• a vision how this team structure supports a path for sustainable agency growth, with reduced risk 

The last 10 minutes are reserved for discussion on an aspect that proves to be especially challenging:

• integrating sales into the teams instead, of more traditionally, account managers or directors