Sharing people with unique skills across multiple teams will likely result in which of the following conditions? (choose the best answer)

Sharing a specialist across multiple Scrum Teams creates a dependency and a bottleneck. The specialist's time is divided, and they cannot serve all teams simultaneously. This forces teams to wait for the specialist to become available, creating queues and increasing the cycle time for Product Backlog Items. This waiting directly impedes the continuous flow of work and slows down the delivery of value to stakeholders. This structure contradicts the Scrum principle of having cross-functional teams that possess all the skills needed to create a "Done" Increment.

B. Teams do not have to develop deep technical skills.

This fosters dependency and prevents teams from becoming truly cross-functional and self-managing, which is a negative outcome, not a benefit.

C. Costs are lower since expensive resources are shared.

This is a common fallacy. The hidden economic cost of delays (Cost of Delay) caused by waiting for a bottleneck resource often far outweighs the perceived savings on salary.

D. More work gets done since people are better utilized.

This confuses being "busy" with delivering value. High utilization of a shared resource leads to queues and context-switching, which reduces the overall throughput of valuable, completed work.

1. Schwaber

K.

& Sutherland

J. (2020). The Scrum Guide. The official guide to Scrum.

Reference: Page 5

"Scrum Team" section. The guide states

"Scrum Teams are cross-functional

meaning the members have all the skills necessary to create value each Sprint." Sharing a specialist violates this principle

creating an external dependency that prevents the team from independently creating value.

2. The Nexus Guide (January 2021). The official guide for scaling Scrum

published by Scrum.org.

Reference: Page 5

"The Nexus Framework" section. The guide emphasizes the need to "Minimize or eliminate cross-team dependencies." A shared specialist is a classic cross-team dependency that the framework advises removing to optimize the flow of value.

3. Hopp

W. J.

& Spearman

M. L. (2004). To Pull or Not to Pull: What Is the Question? Manufacturing & Service Operations Management

6(2)

133–148. (This is a foundational academic paper on operations management principles that underpin flow in Scrum).

Reference: Section on Queuing Theory (pp. 135-137). The principles discussed

such as Kingman's formula

mathematically demonstrate that as the utilization of a resource (the shared specialist) approaches 100%

the waiting time in the queue increases exponentially. This directly supports that teams will wait more often. (DOI: https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.1030.0028)