Back in April, I agreed to be a team member on 2 projects split equally 50/50. This was an experiment I agreed to in order to experience first-hand why team members need to be dedicated to a single project.
It started out fine on planning day. Half the day was dedicated to planning for Project A and the other half for Project B. Half-way through the first sprint, it was apparent what was going to happen. My 3 hours daily allocation per project was working out to be more like 2 effective hours per project and as I was just about ready to implement something cool for Project A, I had to stop and work on Project B.
On the day when QA needed to have the last bits to test, I had incomplete stories on both projects. And of course, the next bad thing that happened was Project A wanted to be more valuable than Project B. So what did I do? Of course! I worked long hours on Project A.
In short, both sprints' goals were not met and I had very few completed stories. Each project became the other's impediment and I "thrashed" between the two of them getting very little done.
This experiment reminds me of a line from Patrick Lencioni's "The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team" where the CEO character had to tell her team they were to pick a #1 priority goal. A member asked why not 2 goals and her reply was, "If every goal is a priority, then none of them are".
In my case, this was exactly what happened. Both projects wanted to be #1 and it's just not realistic. One project needed to be killed (there were no other resources to work on it).
As Scrum practitioners, it's important to learn why certain things don't work well and why others do (such as XP practices). By all means, don't take my word for it. Experience is the best teacher and in this case, my experience was quite the eye opener. We have since moved to strictly dedicated team members. We still have shared resources but none of them own stories and they certainly don't sit at the table.
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