Building a voluntary community after an organisational transfer

Context

In July 2022, a Danish company was acquired by a larger utilities group. Its software-development organisation, about 86 people, was transferred into a larger IT consultancy. I was one of four Scrum Masters moved in the transfer.

At the previous company, we had worked with a dedicated agile coach and held bi-weekly sessions to share practice. The coach left during the transfer. The new company had no equivalent forum; agile sat within its project-management guild as one set of tools among the wider work of running projects.

The presenting problem

The four of us wanted to preserve the professional practice we had lost and give agile work a place of its own. When we announced a dedicated guild, a project manager who had also transferred joined immediately. The five founding members elected me guild master.

At first, the task appeared to be establishing another guild within a structure the company already understood: agree a cadence, hold useful sessions, and account for the internal time.

The underlying problem

The guild needed to show that it was not duplicating the project-management guild. Members who attended both gave us direct feedback about the difference.

The project-management guild approached Scrum and agile as practices used to help a project succeed. Our guild began with the agile manifesto and examined software-development work through that mindset. Workshops went beyond process mechanics into coaching, feedback, teaching, and conflict management.

The distinction was not one guild against another. It was agile as a people skill alongside agile as a project-management tool. Establishing that distinction became more important when cost cutting reduced the appetite for internal work and the company became reluctant to hire dedicated Scrum Masters.

What I did

The founding group decided the cadence, retrospectives, and rotating peer-facilitation model together. Members took turns leading workshops, teaching sessions, and demonstrations, so the programme did not depend on me supplying every subject or running every meeting.

As guild master, I kept the membership and activity records, prepared the management reporting, and accounted for the budget. I argued for and against company guild policies where they affected our work and repeatedly connected the time spent to the company’s aim of making its delivery practices more consistent.

During cost cutting, management asked groups to reduce internal hours and maximise billable time. I defended our planned guild hours and made sure our use of them could withstand scrutiny. When the company leaned towards assigning Scrum Master responsibilities to project managers rather than hiring dedicated practitioners, the guild developed a clearer distinction between the roles and a case for the value of full-time Scrum Masters. I drove that work in several of the meetings when the group’s confidence was low.

What changed

The guild grew from five founding members to twelve active members. Growth continued after membership changed from company-selected to fully voluntary.

Its subject matter also became clearer. The guild had earned a place alongside project management by concentrating on the human practice around software delivery, rather than repeating process instruction available elsewhere.

The Architecture and DevOps guilds both asked us to show them how we structured the group and sustained member participation.

Evidence

I maintained the membership list and confirmed it for the activity statistics presented to the company every six months. Those records support the growth from five to twelve active members, including the period after membership became voluntary.

The requests from the Architecture and DevOps guilds were direct requests to see our way of working. They are evidence that the model was useful beyond our own membership, not a claim that the other guilds copied it in full.

Limits

Our ambitions regularly exceeded the hours available. We dropped initiatives when the work required to change the wider company became too large for a voluntary internal group.

The clearest example was an attempt to establish agile coaching as a service the consultancy could sell. The work stalled without an agile coach on the bench to develop the role, while the company would not hire someone to wait for that demand. The guild came close to defining the proposition but did not create the organisational change it wanted.

The guild later ended because most of its members held roles that were moved in-house during another restructuring. Shared ownership helped it survive voluntary membership and cost pressure; it could not protect the community from the removal of its membership base.

What this demonstrates

The guild earned participation by being specific about the practice it existed to develop and by sharing responsibility for the work. That made it durable within its available hours, but not independent of the organisation that funded those hours.