functional silo teams. The result is that some teams carry an unusual burden at late phases in the lifecycle and had very high turnover at the end of a project. Finally, each team is comprised of domain experts whose skills seldom overlap with those of their team members. It is therefore difficult to impossible to pair on tasks or share responsibility within a team.
Despite all of these challenges, we wanted to move ahead with a different way of managing and organizing projects to better unite test teams and smooth out the delivery of our work product. We chose to introduce Scrum to the organization at the outset of a project, when most of the work was development of pre-silicon infrastructure and readiness work. If we could get Scrum to work during this first phase, we felt the best practices learned in this relatively calm period of the project would find their way into the more stressful execution phase — when daily work is dependent on the health of actual silicon, dynamic external business conditions, and the requirements of the Fabrication, Design, and Manufacturing customers.
PHASE 1: PREPARING FOR SILICON
The initial transition group included six teams and numerous sub-teams. As a first step, we retained Danube Technologies, Inc. as a Scrum education and coaching vendor. Approximately 20 group leads and technical leads attended a two-day Certified ScrumMaster training course as an intense introduction to Scrum principles and practices. Unfortunately, three senior managers missed the training and this resulted in subsequent impediments throughout the transition process. Executive sponsorship was critical to our success. Having our three most senior leaders absent from the initial training led to gaps in their knowledge of the changes we were trying to make.
After the training, participants attended a retrospective meeting and discussed, without Danube representatives present, their thoughts, reservations, and commitment level to a Scrum approach to project management. The team leaders agreed to commit to three months of implementing Scrum principles and practices “by the book” prior to questioning the effectiveness of the new process or attempting to tailor it to Intel needs. A Process Action Team (PAT) was formed to monitor the development of Scrum within the pilot teams and to provide support for process questions. Even though agreement was there, I could already sense a split in the organization into “pigs” and “chickens” in terms of supporting Scrum.