Distribution is the reality of many teams, and working at a distance quickly brings in silo behaviours and processes. From my experience of working in and coaching distributed teams, I’ll share how to work well in agile distributed teams, and in particular how to not isolate yourself from the development.
I’ll share how you can:
Maximise adoption of video call over telephone or voice only
Leverage the power of chat to overcome language mastery issues
Apply Lean Startup methods to working together as a team
Share work that is still in progress
Use demos to show the work done, not the output
Use development agile practices to get buy-in from the team, such as iterative highlights, debt, 100 point stories
Welcome disruption from the rest of the team
Work across timezones
I’m still discovering how to work best with distributed teams, and love this challenge. I’m currently working with Pearson, the Education publisher, where distribution is there to stay, and it’s giving me plenty of opportunities to experiment tools and practices.