T-Shaped Skills Case Study

Sometimes, agile development teams must face challenges that require more flexibility and shorter response times than what experts recommend, at the same time, they don’t have all the tools, information and resources they need to get the job done. I believe that in such extreme scenarios, when all odds are against the team, there is a type of team that is more likely to succeed: those teams built according to a new T-shaped skills paradigm.

What does ‘T-shaped skills’ mean?

A while ago, I learned about the concept of T-shaped skills as one of the desired development team characteristics; I originally found this concept in the book Essential Scrum by Kenneth Rubin.

In brief: a person with T-shaped skills has the ability to do different jobs
Individuals and interactions

In addition to your abilities with some programming language or your capacity to test new features, you need to know and understand the context in which the development team is immersed.

The Agile Manifesto stresses the human aspect over the task-oriented aspect in its first value sentence:

‘Individuals and interactions over processes and tools’
In Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Tim Lister, the impact of the human aspect on the success of projects is discussed:

“The cause of failure most frequently cited by our survey participants was ‘politics.’ […] Included under ‘politics’ are such unrelated or loosely related things as communication problems, staffing problems, disenchantment with the boss or with the client, lack of motivation, and high turnover. People often use the word politics to describe any aspect of the work that is people-related […]: They constitute the project’s
t-shaped-skills-reloaded

This new approach can enable development teams to boost the efficiency of other teams and simplify the interaction between different areas.

Many examples sprint to mind: support teams deal with scenarios that are hard to plan in advance, and have to answer according to SLAs policies; so the development team could help greatly by just writing better logs. Professional services teams would benefit greatly from better installation practices or better deployment documentation. The more aligned with product managers or product owners team members are, the less detailed functional specifications need be. Development teams can also help sales teams to ensure their sales pitch matches product technical specifications.

It should be noted that not all members of a team should have the same abilities; some could be more dedicated to ‘doing’ and others to ‘understanding’. I believe that expanding the ‘broad’ axis to include the ability to understand outside needs can make a team more robust, adaptable and fun to work