At this moment we have 4 Agile teams in different levels of maturity. These teams are working on 2 parallel releases. With almost all engineers “accounted for” we saw challenges with triaging smaller projects that do not “fit” the overall theme PO is driving with the Scrum team for the nearest release. These include internal Engineering projects, hot support issues, customer commits, etc. In pre-Agile world the decision was mainly driven by skill set appropriate for the project and the priority of that project relative to other projects. There is no reason why it would be different in Agile, but for some reason it became more difficult to apply the same criteria for decision making. My take on this is before we thought we are making the right calls as far as priority goes, while now we are forced (by Agile process) to have the honest discussion on cross-team priorities and figure out which team takes a hit.
One of the cybernetics principles (that I learned about from Jurgen Apello’s book “Management 3.0”) states that optimizing the outcome for a subsystem will in general not optimize the outcome for the system as a whole. I think this is one of the challenges with Agile transformation: keeping the global optimum in mind while planning the work for the multiple teams. Both Engineering Management and Product Management need to keep the entire picture in mind rather than focusing on themes worked by individual teams. This approach will undoubtedly force discussions with painful decisions, but this is Agile living to it's promise: shining the light on problems in the organization.. It's up to you whether to fix the prioritization and decision making process or not.
