achieving success with distributed teams

IMPROVING ENTERPRISESTonight’s Sponsor

ACHIEVING SUCCESS WITH DISTRIBUTED TEAMS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

-Jane Prusakova-Luid Hancock

JOSH WOODCOCK

• 4-5 years with Agile• Scrum Master, BA, Coach, Programmer, Architect, PM• Small to Large Enterprises• Insurance, Financial, Internet Marketing

Audience

• Considering• Tried it, didn’t work.• Distributed = Dark Side• Doing• Awesome• Agony• What’s distributed?

?

Problem #1

Problem #1

Problem #1

Problem #1

Skill & Competitive

Cost

$$

Problem #1

Solution #1

Solution #1 Remote source skilled workers

Solution #1

?

Problem #2

Problem #2

THE STORY

THE EPIPHANYSame Place, Different Locations

Team Member Locations

How we are doing?

• Customer satisfaction is so high they are recommending us to other companies

• Product direction changes weekly• CI server builds multiple times per day as code is checked

in• Pair programming and backlog grooming occurs naturally

throughout day• Employees are highly autonomous and require little to no

management involvement• Most of collaboration is face to face or through screen

sharing

How we are doing?

• Working software demonstrated at least weekly to customers and users

• Team members work 40-45 hrs / week• Technical enhancements are written in business terms

and prioritized in product backlog• Releases to production provide new value every 1-2

weeks• Teams velocity is about the same for each team member• Team identifies opportunities and follows through on

improvements weekly

Operational Foundations

Project Tracking

JOSH WOODCOCK

Josh.Woodcock@ImprovingEnterprises.com(407) 235-4361@BJoshWoodcock

Operationally critical elements• Virtual team room

– As long as you are working you have your web cam or screen share on

• 1 week iterations• Use of video instead of face conversation• Limited use of email• Phones are only used when absolutely necessary. Facial expressions

drastically improve communication.• Daily code integration, daily builds, and test driven development• Pair group programming and testing

Things that help a lot

• Near same time zone to maintain common working hours

• Team members desire to overcome personal challenges, and bring out the best in one another

• Occasional meet up in same room. Establish relationships early in project if it’s a brand new team.

Things that help a lot

• Communication is superfluous not back and forth.

• Management resolves team level obstacles in 2 days or less

• Forum or Wiki for team communication, meeting notes, living documents

Things that help a lot

• Limit email within the team– Use voice or forum for discussions– Subscription-based email service to document

updates– Google docs, Confluence Wiki, Sharepoint, GitHub

Continuous communication

• As a general rule, every team members is available to others for ad-hoc discussions

• Responses are given within minutes or seconds– Not hours or days

Learning Experiences

• 5 days is great. 3 days is not enough. 4 days is minimum.

• Turn around time on questions from PO must be less than 15 mins during day

• Improving once a week from retrospectives due to short iterations drastically improves performance

• Recurring scheduled collaboration sessions, like pairing, makes communication more superfluous since ad-hoc meetings are more difficult to schedule

• An awesome distributed team will still do better than an average collocated team

Recommended Web-based tools• JIRA Agile, Rally, VesionOne, etc.• Google Hangouts, Lync, Skype 4.2 for

continuous communication and collaboration

• GoTo Meeting, WebEx for presentations• http://www.planningpoker.com/ works

great for planning poker

Other Resources

• http://confluex.com/blog/a-distributed-teams-insurance/

• http://beagile.biz/agile-collaboration-tools/