• Agile Coach

Remote Agile Teams (RAT) solution during Corona pandemic

Business in the Netherlands is virtually at a standstill. At the same time, top economist Nouriel Roubini is warning of an economic disaster, which, moreover, will cost Trump his re-election. Opponents of Trump will be happy that every downside has its upside, but a global economic crisis is a very high price to pay.

Europeans are no longer allowed to travel to the US. EU borders are now also closed. Schools are closed. Stock markets are turning deep dark red and the Dutch state has a huge package of measures and deep pockets.

But what can we do ourselves?

Can we adjust our practices to minimize the damage? The most likely reflex of the masses is “inspect and complain. In other words, observe that there is a Corona pandemic and it is causing restrictions and economic damage, and complain that you find this very annoying.

In Agile, we have a different pattern for this: Inspect and Adapt! See what changes are happening in the here-and-now and adjust what is needed to respond to that change. The sailboat metaphor has been used most often for this in the Agile Community: “You can’t change the wind, but you can change the position of your sails.

Okay, nice words, but then what can we adapt if Agile teams want to work together in 1 room and have face-to-face open discussions with each other, while a significant part is isolated at home?

Remote Agile Teams

What we can at least do is delve into how Remote Agile Teams (RAT) work, allowing the high economic contributions of these Agile units to at least continue. Hence this refresher on RAT.

If it is not necessary then Agile teams actually do not work remotely, they experience a lot of benefit from multidisciplinary collaboration with each other in the same space. If it does happen it is usually because the team or tribe consists of a unit whose members operate in different countries or even continents. The ground rules for these teams are:

• Structure the global teams equal to the different time zones;
• Promote trust between teams and team members by paying more attention to remote social dialogues;
• Unify team culture, by explicitly sharing lessons learned (collaboration, team, product, organization);
• Scrum events take place with all teams online at the same time.

What is different now

We are now talking not only about global distributed teams, but also just the Agile team that is used to the shared obeya space at, say, the headquarters in Amsterdam. That due to government or corporate measures are no longer allowed to work together in one space. For that, in times of corona pandemic, additional ground rules apply. I am thinking of the following challenges:

• How do we maintain the power of visual communication?
• How do we maintain the power of constant open dialogue?
• How do we share all our information centrally in a transparent way?
• How do we organize the Scrum events?

Individual interaction over processes and tools

With these types of challenges, we usually tend to deploy online tools and then think we have solved everything with that. The opposite is plausible. In theory, a tool can often solve the problem just fine. In practice, much is lost if you elevate the tool as a solver.

The solution is almost always in the people themselves. People with the same vision of how to work together as well as possible achieve more without tools than people who have all the tools at their disposal but no shared vision of how they want to work together. Therefore, to be successful, we always work on the Agile principle “individual interaction over processes and tools” first and build on the “shared-vision, shared goals” principle in the teams or between the teams.

To do this remotely, we need to use social tools to keep discussing with each other. Slack seems to be a great solution that everyone can work with and where you can categorize and manage the discussions, allowing you to focus on what is relevant to you and not get everything mixed up. Slack is already better than Whatsapp for this, but still lacks the visual component. As is Trello to support backlog, Sprint Planning and progress for teams. The tool is fine, but don’t expect the tool to fill in the lack of togetherness. It is still a discipline to work together, with the possible support of a tool.

Additional RAT basics:

• Reserve time for team spirit, for example, by playing an online game daily with the whole team and building a competition each week. Each week it is a different team member’s turn to choose a “game of the week.
• Reserve time to hold open discussions online, direct them according to sociocratic principles to avoid framing or Polish land days and promote direction, focus and depth. Here lies an additional discipline to be developed for the Scrum Master.
• Continue to value visualizations over text. Research which online tools fit the nature of the team and its work. For example, Mentimeter is a useful tool for playing poker online with a team. Again, an additional task for the Scrum Master.
• Give new team members space to get to know all team members personally in 1-on-1 videoconference sessions. In the same office, a new team member should also have face-2-face coffee with everyone. This increases trust. A great example I saw recently was a personal vlog, where team members show who they are, where they live, their family situation and hobbies. The better team members know each other, the better the trust to be open with each other. This is always important, but with Remote Agile Teams it is good to pay extra attention to this.

Many of the additional disciplines require more from the Scrum Master. Therefore we have developed an additional module for Scrum Masters who want to use RAT to secure their economic value even in times of Corona pandemic. If you are interested in that please send an email to Gert-Jan.

The advantage of the resulting situation is that with the current refinement and further development of RAT, we are likely to improve regular RAT for global distributed teams as well! New beliefs lead to new systems and these lead to new patterns. The world will never be the same again!

Want to spar with me online about this? You can. Send me a message at Adrie@scrumacademy.nl or call me at 0651372341. Then we’ll schedule a Coronaproof online call and work directly on your next step in the organization.