Distributed Scrum Team - Remote team collaboration Need at Time of Covid.
Distributed Team is the new reality mainly due to globalization and flourishing technology enabling the same. Businesses are shifting to emerging economics due to reduced business operation cost and an easy availability of talented workforce. This has created new challenges in team coordination and management. And so it’s critical for enterprises to arm themselves with the right tools and processes.
Agile/ Scrum is the latest buzzword. With Distributed Scrum teams located at different geographies collaborate and work effectively to achieve the goal. I had multiple opportunities to work on distributed team with the goal to create product experts at multiple geo-locations. This was essential to cater to expanding business at new location and to manage costs. I faced following major challenges:
·Cultural and language differences – The most important role for Scrum master is to help team members know each other well, build trust and confidence on each other. I did this by facilitating regular video conferencing between teams, sharing team photos which helped in developing a collaborative environment.
·Communication Gap – To ensure there is no communication gap, minutes of the meeting with all important points was circulated to the team.
·Different time zones and conflicting working hours – Team members complaint if they have to work odd hours to coordinate across different time zones. This was taken care by giving rotating responsibility across members.
·Selecting the right tools – An effective tool chain is required for repositories, SCM, management, build and deployment setup, defect tracking, and project management. Involvement of team in selecting these tools and improvising the processes motivates them.
Continuous Integration and deployment should be promoted so that distributed team have less dependency in terms of code integration and merging.
·Technical dependency- Generally there are domain /technology experts in the team and hence have high dependency. This at times create bottleneck in their absence. To counter the same we promoted regular knowledge sharing and brainstorming sessions.
·Product backlog is shared between team or they have different product backlog- Generally even if the team is working on same product it is very much important to see if Product owner are same or it is shared responsibility; accordingly get the backlog created.
·Sprint planning – Once the backlog is created by joint effort of team and PO, it is important that it is provided with Story size. To size the story, distributed team is guided to choose same estimation techniques.
·Reports/ graph – It is also important that hard work team is putting is reflected through proper graph and reports. The Product Owner and senior management expectation in terms of graph should be understood and generated. As a Coach we can also help them with other form of reports in terms of team / project progress.
·Conflicts – with the big team the conflict situation would also increase and it is important that conflicts are handled in a right way and keep everyone motivated and focused in their work.
·Appreciate / celebrate – Every hard work shall be appreciated and celebrated across team. It shall be reflected through information radiator or floated through mail or put in team page.
·Collaboration – To improve collaboration between team play some collaborative game; promote team party. This helps in forming good relationship between team.
Ensure Agile / Scrum value is well understood by team.
·Community of Practice - The different representative working on same technology /tool can form Community in the Organization who can share their experience and knowledge. It helps to build technical excellence.
With all this, it is also important to align to the company culture and keep a check that everything is within the right limits. “From a culture perspective, you really have to shift to a culture where it is okay to have some failures as long as you are learning from the failures and not duplicating your mistakes”. Following were my takeaways:
- Have limited but productive meetings/brain storming sessions. Too much meetings wastes team time. The idea is to build an environment where team members are motivated to contribute to meetings.
·Communication Gap – To ensure there is no communication gap, minutes of the meeting with all important points was circulated to the team.
·Different time zones and conflicting working hours – Team members complaint if they have to work odd hours to coordinate across different time zones. This was taken care by giving rotating responsibility across members.
·Selecting the right tools – An effective tool chain is required for repositories, SCM, management, build and deployment setup, defect tracking, and project management. Involvement of team in selecting these tools and improvising the processes motivates them.
Continuous Integration and deployment should be promoted so that distributed team have less dependency in terms of code integration and merging.
·Technical dependency- Generally there are domain /technology experts in the team and hence have high dependency. This at times create bottleneck in their absence. To counter the same we promoted regular knowledge sharing and brainstorming sessions.
·Product backlog is shared between team or they have different product backlog- Generally even if the team is working on same product it is very much important to see if Product owner are same or it is shared responsibility; accordingly get the backlog created.
·Sprint planning – Once the backlog is created by joint effort of team and PO, it is important that it is provided with Story size. To size the story, distributed team is guided to choose same estimation techniques.
·Reports/ graph – It is also important that hard work team is putting is reflected through proper graph and reports. The Product Owner and senior management expectation in terms of graph should be understood and generated. As a Coach we can also help them with other form of reports in terms of team / project progress.
·Conflicts – with the big team the conflict situation would also increase and it is important that conflicts are handled in a right way and keep everyone motivated and focused in their work.
·Appreciate / celebrate – Every hard work shall be appreciated and celebrated across team. It shall be reflected through information radiator or floated through mail or put in team page.
·Collaboration – To improve collaboration between team play some collaborative game; promote team party. This helps in forming good relationship between team.
Ensure Agile / Scrum value is well understood by team.
·Community of Practice - The different representative working on same technology /tool can form Community in the Organization who can share their experience and knowledge. It helps to build technical excellence.
With all this, it is also important to align to the company culture and keep a check that everything is within the right limits. “From a culture perspective, you really have to shift to a culture where it is okay to have some failures as long as you are learning from the failures and not duplicating your mistakes”. Following were my takeaways:
- Have limited but productive meetings/brain storming sessions. Too much meetings wastes team time. The idea is to build an environment where team members are motivated to contribute to meetings.
- Culturally –USA teams prefer working in terms of story sizing and prefer Velocity based Sprint planning but in India Senior management prefer Capacity based planning. In my opinion, you should not stick to one. Try and see how much business value team is able to deliver in trying any of this or mixing the two.
-Management may complain or do not appreciate the need of collaborative Game; Try to influence and convince them by showing result.
-In case of handling distributed team or scaling Agility. It is important to note that neither bottom up nor top down approach works until people have mindset to adapt.
-In case of handling distributed team or scaling Agility. It is important to note that neither bottom up nor top down approach works until people have mindset to adapt.
Wow, so amazing reasons that you have shared here & this will be must helpful for all. Actually, I know how Agile Scrum is so important reason behind successful career through tryScrum , as I did Agile Scrum course from this & it has been really so useful for me.
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