I started as a Scrum Master at open200 in February and was lucky to join an exciting project that was just starting out with a great team. One of the challenges of the project was that there were some devOPs things to handle to get the project off the ground where the team needed to reach out to experienced devOPs colleagues from time to time to check about certain details. Seeing as open200 works very collaboratively those colleagues were always quick and happy to lend a hand. However, sometimes our colleagues were too busy with their own projects to help us out right away. And as a new colleague myself, it was hard to know who else at the company had the expertise we needed.

Scrum as solution

As a Scrum Master, my goal is to help my team and the company work as efficiently as possible. To solve these challenges, we came up with a twofold solution. First, we added an overview of everyone's skill levels for specific technologies, frameworks, or programming languages to our HR tool, Personio. Second, we created a project in our repository manager, Gitlab, where people can
describe a problem they need help with and use the labels from Personio to tag the problem.

Here's how it works

Instead of asking individual people if they have time to help, a whole pool of people gets notified about the issue. Those who have the right skills can offer to help, or leave comments with their ideas and suggestions. And if someone has time to tackle the issue with the team, they can assign the issue to themselves and schedule a call to solve the problem together.

The new initiative openSkillShare

We call this new initiative openSkillShare, and it's all about creating a space for informal and collaborative knowledge sharing within open200, openDEVS, and thePIM company. Our vision is to create a kind of Stack Overflow for our teams, where we can tackle problems together and brainstorm ideas. By making it easy for everyone to contribute and help each other out, we hope to foster the existing culture of collaboration and innovation across the company even further.