Agile Use Of Dedicated Teams [closed]

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When reading the Agile Manifesto, they don't mention anything about dedicated teams. However on some websites (example: this article on agile teams) they claim it's necessary to have a dedicated team to work agile. I understand it's a critical success factor, however, is having a dedicated team obligatory to work agile?

Answer 1

Note that in most articles, dedication means that the person is committed to the success of the project, not that the team is dedicated in a management sense.

Example from the article you linked to, emphasis mine:

[...] are dedicated to continuously improving their ability to deliver software

Another example, from Successful Teams Are Small And Dedicated, emphasis mine:

And it gets worse: dedicated team members aren’t so understanding of these “fence straddlers”. Frustration at their lack of commitment quickly escalates into open conflict and, when no remedy is found, casting that person out of the team.

The dedication to the success of the team is indeed a critical success factor. If some team members don't feel that they should do whatever they need for the success of the project, they are not good candidates for agile teams.

For instance, one of the behaviors expected from each member in an agile team is to do tasks which are broader than the core skills of the person: a Python developer should be able to go and fix an SQL query if needed, and a JavaScript developer can explore and fix Python code if needed.

In this situation, a non-dedicated person will simply expect others to do their jobs. A Python developer will blame the DBA for being late, and a JavaScript developer will blame server-side developers. With this sort of relations between team mates, chances are that any form of agile will fail.

The management-type dedication, on the other hand, may be crucial or not, depending on the circumstances. If some members don't know how much they will spend working on the project for the next sprint, it may become difficult to manage the project.

From the article you linked to:

Each team member is fully dedicated to the team and works intensely during a responsible workweek.

On the other hand, nothing forces a person to work on a single project. Some people may have very specific and very important skills, and several projects at a time can benefit from those skills. For instance, someone who is very skillful at security or optimization may not necessarily be needed full-time on a project.

Answer 2

If you don't have dedicated teams, many agile tools will not work. Burndown charts, story points, the foundation of estimating and planning is pretty much worthless when you have a high or very high turnover rate in your "team".

Being a team and working as a team is a core principle of at least SCRUM (I guess you could have kanban with constantly shifting members). SCRUM gets better iteratively because the team will know each other better and can make better estimates based on previous experience. If you don't have a dedicated team, it's like starting SCRUM all over any time your team changes completely.