at least five tips to improve your geographically distributed agile team

At Least Five Tips for Improving Your Geographically Distributed Agile

Team

Johanna Rothman New: Manage Your Job Search

@johannarothman www.jrothman.com

jr@jrothman.com 781-641-4046

© 2014 Johanna Rothman

Let’s Gather a Little Data

How many of you are new

to agile, less than two years

in?

How many of you are trying

to do agile with a dispersed

team?

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© 2014 Johanna Rothman

Johanna’s General Agile Picture

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© 2014 Johanna Rothman

Tip #1: Charter the Project

Team creates the vision

Team creates release

criteria

Team creates team norms

Provides you a start on

knowing the culture of the

people on the team

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© 2014 Johanna Rothman

Problem: Create Trust When Everyone is in a Different Place

Travel to the same place!

Builds respect

Cheaper than you think

“Wage cost is not the same as

labor cost”

Have you measured the value

stream, cycle time, or cost to

fix a defect?

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© 2014 Johanna Rothman

Tip #2: Build a Time Zone Chart

When is everyone?

Can we have standups?

This time zone chart is

from a real project

Don’t do standups if

everyone is going to fall

asleep

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© 2014 Johanna Rothman

Tip #3: Create a Visual System that Works for This Team

What kind of a board do

you need? What will make it

easy for people to show

their work? How can

people do their best work?

Learn about the Cynefin

framework

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Obvious

ComplicatedComplex

Chaotic

Known unknowns sense-analyse-respond

Known knowns sense-categorise-respond

Unknowable unknowns act-sense-respond

Unknown unknowns probe-sense-respond

© 2014 Johanna Rothman

Compare Visual Systems

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© 2014 Johanna Rothman

Tip #4: Power the Infrastructure

Scrimping on licenses or

power is crazy

If everyone doesn’t have

access to everything, you

don’t have a project team

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© 2014 Johanna Rothman

Tip #5: Watch Where You Put People

Where possible, put testers

near developers because of

feedback. You want feedback

fast in an agile team

If you can’t do that, what

else can you do?

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© 2014 Johanna Rothman

Tip #6: Keep Teams Together

Managers have to manage

the project portfolio and

not move people like chess

pieces

Even more critical in a

distributed team where it

takes so long to build trust

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© 2014 Johanna Rothman

References and Reading

I have many readings on my site:

www.jrothman.com

Lessons Learned from Teaching Workshops

About Geographically Distributed Teams

Many Pragmatic Managers

Blog posts on www.jrothman.com/blog/

mpd

Stay in touch?

Pragmatic Manager: www.jrothman.com/

pragmaticmanager

Please link with me on LinkedIn

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