Quartered: Being a shared resource on an Agile team

What do you do when you’re only part of a person?

As a tech writer, I am a resource to several teams.

This is a from-the-trenches accounting of how to know when your loyalties are divided and how to handle that with grace and business logic.

There are some roles in an Agile team that are too important to ignore and too small to dedicate a full-time person to. The typical solution is to split the person among several teams, so each team gets coverage from the technical writer/integration tester/GUI designer. This is a pretty good solution, but it takes unique team and resource skills to go to four entry/exit meetings, to juggle the priorities of different teams, to see the company goal in the midst of team goals.

Attendees will leave with practical tips on managing team expectations, talking to business owners, and advocating for the best use of their time across all their teams. I also have some strong advice on how to manage these split resources so they don’t burn out .

Come to this talk if you’ve ever been a split resource, or worked with one. If you haven’t ever worked with a split resource, and you have more than one agile team, come to this talk to hear a passionate explanation on why you need to have a writer and a tester and other specialists in your company.

I have given several other talks related to being a technical writer, but your conference seems uniquely suited for a talk about how to manage multiple teams from within.

I’m a dynamic and exciting speaker with a unique perspective on the machinery of agile teams. I’ve been doing agile since we called it extreme programming, and I’ve always been a writer.

Here is a talk I gave this year on a different topic: http://confreaks.tv/videos/rubyconf2015-the-seven-righteous-fights