Increasing the say-do ratio of an agile team in a resource-shared environment using a traditional project management approach

Although Scrum declares that team members have to be dedicated to their teams during a sprint, in practice these team members are often shared throughout an organization. As a consequence, there is less focus on fulfilling the sprint plans. Instead of trying to enforce Scrum guidelines and having dedicated resources in each sprint, we accepted this organizational constraint and adapted our existing development process to take into account the fact that human resources will be shared during sprints. In this paper, we show how we used a set of traditional project management practices to adjust the sprint planning and monitoring processes in a resource-shared environment setting. We performed a 7-month case study in the context of the project Digital Villages, where five technical teams shared resources while working on eight products in parallel during the various sprints. The approach increased the overall say-do ratio of the team from 48% to 79%. Open challenges include further improvement of the say-do ratio in such environments and better predictability of it.