MGT 571 Week 2 Staffing for Agility Example

Who Belongs on an Agile Product Team? Staffing Cross-Functional Teams at Tippecanoe Orthopedic Systems

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

MGT/571: Staffing, Leading and Controlling for Agile Environments

Week 2 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

Tippecanoe Orthopedic Systems and all staffing data are composites written for a model paper.

Tippecanoe Orthopedic Systems, the composite implant maker in Warsaw, Indiana, has decided to start agile teams for its surgical planning software and two surgical instrument projects. Its 180 engineers and developers are organized by function: mechanical engineering, software, testing, quality and regulatory affairs. Staff are assigned to projects by department heads, often to several projects at once. Agile methods change how work is organized, but the people on the team, and whether they can work across their specialties, decide whether those methods succeed. This paper designs Tippecanoe's staffing for agility.

Roles in an Agile Team

Agile teams need a product owner, who represents users and sets priorities; a team facilitator, sometimes called a scrum master, who removes obstacles; and team members who build, test and document the product. In a regulated setting, quality and regulatory expertise must be part of the team rather than a later checkpoint.

Team Composition for Software

The planning software team will include a product owner with surgical workflow knowledge, five software developers, a user experience designer, a software test engineer, a quality engineer and a part-time regulatory specialist, nine people in total.

Team Composition for Instruments

Each instrument team will include a product owner, three mechanical engineers, a manufacturing engineer, a test engineer, a quality engineer and a regulatory specialist shared with another team, eight people per team.

Evidence on Team Design

Mathieu et al. (2008) reviewed a decade of research on team effectiveness and highlighted the importance of team composition, shared understanding, stable membership and supportive context. Teams whose members work together over time develop coordination and trust. Tippecanoe will keep team membership stable for at least a year rather than reshuffling engineers among projects.

Dedicated Members

Agile teams work best when members are dedicated. Engineers now split time across three or four projects, losing time to switching. Team members will be assigned full time, which means other projects must be paused or staffed differently.

Skills Gap Analysis

A skills inventory found that Tippecanoe has strong mechanical engineers and capable developers but only two people with product owner experience, few quality engineers comfortable reviewing work every two weeks and no user experience designers. Most engineers have deep skills in one area; few have the broader, T-shaped profiles that help cross-functional teams.

Closing the Gaps Internally

Senior engineers with surgeon relationships will be trained as product owners. Quality engineers will learn to integrate design control activities into sprints. Engineers will receive cross-training in testing and documentation. Developing people internally preserves knowledge of Tippecanoe's products and regulatory history.

Employment Arrangements

Cappelli and Keller (2013) classified work arrangements, from direct employment to contracting and staffing through agencies, and noted that each carries different control, cost and legal implications. Tippecanoe can hire employees, use individual contractors, use agency staff or partner with a software firm.

Comparing the Options

Employees build long-term knowledge and are best for roles involving regulated design history. Contractors and agency staff add capacity quickly for specialized tasks, such as user experience design, but leave with their knowledge. A software partner could build parts of the planning tool but would require careful oversight of quality documentation.

Recommended Mix

Product owners, quality engineers, regulatory specialists and most developers will be employees. A user experience designer and two developers will be contracted for the first year while a permanent designer is hired. No regulated design decisions will be made solely by contractors.

Legal Considerations

Contractors must be classified correctly. Workers who are controlled like employees, work full time on core functions and are economically dependent on Tippecanoe may be employees under federal and state law, regardless of contract labels. Agency arrangements also create joint employer questions. Contracts will define deliverables and limit day-to-day control.

Hiring for Agile Roles

Agile work requires collaboration, communication and learning alongside technical skill. Sackett et al. (2022) found that structured interviews and work samples are among the most valid selection tools. Candidates for agile roles will complete a structured interview with behavioral questions about collaboration and changing priorities and a work sample, such as reviewing a user story and proposing tests.

An Internal Talent Marketplace

To move people quickly, Tippecanoe will create an internal marketplace listing team openings and stretch assignments. Engineers can apply to move between teams at quarterly planning points, with managers unable to block moves without cause. This builds resource fluidity.

What Dedicated Teams Displace

Assigning 26 people full time to three agile teams removes them from other work. A portfolio review identified seven lower-priority projects, mostly minor instrument updates, that will pause for six months, and two that will be completed by a contract engineering firm under Tippecanoe's quality system. Leaders chose this tradeoff deliberately: spreading engineers across many projects had been one cause of three-year development times.

Workforce Planning for Flexibility

Agility requires the ability to shift people as priorities change. Tippecanoe will plan its engineering workforce with a core of permanent staff sized for steady demand and a flexible layer of about 10 percent drawn from contractors and partners for peaks. Quarterly portfolio reviews will decide where the flexible layer goes. Cross-training also adds flexibility: an engineer who can test as well as design can move to wherever the bottleneck is.

Onboarding Into Teams

New and transferring team members will complete a two-week onboarding that covers agile practices, the team's product and the design control procedures that apply to sprint work. Pairing newcomers with experienced team members for their first sprints speeds learning and reinforces the collaborative norms agile teams need.

Supporting Functions

Agile teams depend on quality, regulatory, manufacturing and supply functions outside the teams. Those functions will assign liaisons to each team and adjust their workloads for faster review cycles.

Diversity and Fairness in Team Staffing

Moving to dedicated teams creates new opportunities, and the way people are chosen matters. If department heads pick their favorites, existing networks will decide who joins the most visible projects. Openings will be posted in the internal marketplace with clear criteria, and selection panels will include members from outside the hiring department. Monitoring who applies and who is selected, by gender, age and other characteristics, will show whether the new teams draw from the whole engineering workforce.

Measuring Staffing Success

Staffing measures include time to fill team roles, the share filled internally, team stability over twelve months, engineer engagement scores and retention of team members. Early results will be compared with the previous functional model to see whether dedicated teams improve both speed and satisfaction.

Career Paths

Engineers worry that leaving functional departments will hurt their careers. Tippecanoe will create technical career ladders that recognize team contributions and product owner roles as paths to leadership.

Conclusion

Agile teams at Tippecanoe will include product, engineering, testing, quality and regulatory roles, with stable, dedicated members. Internal development will close most skill gaps, contractors will fill short-term needs and employees will hold regulated knowledge. Valid selection, an internal marketplace and clear career paths support the flexibility agility requires.

References

Cappelli, P., & Keller, J. R. (2013). Classifying work in the new economy. Academy of Management Review, 38(4), 575-596. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2011.0302

Mathieu, J., Maynard, M. T., Rapp, T., & Gilson, L. (2008). Team effectiveness 1997-2007: A review of recent advancements and a glimpse into the future. Journal of Management, 34(3), 410-476. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206308316061

Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection: Addressing systematic overcorrection for restriction of range. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040-2068. https://doi.org/10.1037/apl0000994