Hi Nick;

We too have a large effort where most teams are using scrum. We have a combination of code and content developers aligned into 10 Scrum teams. Much of the functionality we deliver requires coordination across teams and departments. We had Jeff Sutherland come and do some initial ramp up training when we only had 2-3 teams but our efforts have become bigger and more complex. We are struggling with nearly the same array of SOS issues that you call out.

We are experimenting with allowing 1 team with a dedicated PO to be 'point' and having that team in turn act as the PO for constituent teams. This simplifies the points of contact for stakeholders and ensures that constituent teams are delivering needed dependencies to the 'point' team in a sort of hybrid model somewhere between scrum and classic release management. I do not think we have it quite perfected yet but it has been a good excercise and I am liking the over-all direction.

I find it unacceptable for a PO to need to keep track of multiple overlapping teams/sprints and attempt to coordinate the deliveries of multiple teams into cohesive features. It causes additional communications overhead and invites the PO to manage "aka meddle with" team and inter-team dependencies that they should be managing themselves. As a result we're putting together a hierarchical system allowing a high level ticket to be decomposed into sprint backlog items across several teams while maintaining progress/burndown feeders back into the master ticket.

Do you keep an independent blog or any kind of a chronicle of your particular adventures? I am interested in hearing more about the methods you are finding success with.

-G