The place I work used to be a waterfall shop and last year we transitioned to Lean/Agile. Got reorganized into product teams, then split further into scrum teams consisting of business analysts, developers and QA teams, got formal coaching and everything. For the most part it's going well, except that I feel like a misfit.

In many ways our business is still Waterfall, and that strongly influences my work. Let me explain that better: we work closely with our industry, talking with them about business problems, designing solutions and working with them to implement the solutions. For the last half-century the way we did this was by organizing working groups which are face to face business meetings. At those, we present some proposed solution concepts, discuss them, tweak or rework them conceptually, and negotiate implementation timelines. Once we get everybody to agree on the timelines, we have to document the solution in detail and publish it along with the proposed implementation date.

My specific job is to come up with those solution concepts, present them at the working groups, and then document and publish them. The icing on that Waterfall cake is that most of the time our industry partners demand to see the solution details 6-12 months before the implementation date so they have time to do their own development.

Our management doesn't seem to understand that this is completely in conflict with the Agile approach, even though they're pushing us to make Agile work. So in practice, we have to juggle this stuff in addition to actual Agile development for some new internal systems we're building. It hasn't come to a conflict yet because the two scrum teams I'm assigned to have been focusing almost entirely on the new internal systems that they can prototype, learn, tweak, and incrementally build sprint by sprint.

But me... 100% of my job is documentation, specifically this detailed stuff for the industry to ingest for their development. When we do sprint planning, the teams have gotten into the habit of splitting, story-pointing and assigning tasks for the their work until they've reached their velocity goal and then they turn to me saying "okay, now we'll take a look at jcwoman's tickets". So I feel like I'm an island, working alone and never collaborating with anybody, they all see me as being different. They put me on two scrum teams because company politics wouldn't let them have "two of me".

When I bring this issue up to the product manager, she asked me to let her know when I come to a priority conflict where I can't get things done in time, then she'll make sure they pick up some of my tickets. The problem I've had with this is that my stuff is so far ahead of the game (I have to plan and work 6-8 months ahead of everyone else) that even though I often feel over-allocated, I can't point to any one thing and say it won't get done in time. Because for me "in time" is the implementation date in 6 months.

I commented to the PM that the problem is because I'm still working Waterfall when everybody else is Agile, but she just disagrees. Another part of the problem is that I'll work 100% for one scrum team this sprint and nothing for the other scrum team, and vica versa the next sprint, so again that makes it hard for me to say that I can't keep up. The best I've been able to do is tell whichever product owner who wants my work that I can't this sprint but maybe next sprint.

Maybe it's entirely psychological, I don't know. It's not that I have too much to do. It's that I feel like a team of one, tucked into two scrum teams and not really allowed to collaborate with anyone. Kind of lonely, like an outsider.