Five Tips for Distributed Agile Teams
by Mishkin Berteig, 14 April 2011 | Agile Teams
This post is from Agile Advice - Working With Agile Methods (Scrum, OpenAgile, Lean) by Mishkin Berteig. Click here to see the original post in full.
Actually, this is six tips because my first tip is really about deciding to use distributed teams…Some in-house studies that I have been privy to have shown 2-1 or 3-1 productivity difference between good co-located teams and “good” virtual teams. Creating a true, high-performance virtual team is incredibly hard emotionally, incredibly time-consuming, and costs a lot in terms of tools and travel. If this is being done for convenience of the team members or for cost savings, it’s a bad idea. The only good reason to have distributed teams is if there is a compelling strategic reason that trumps the hit you will take financially and morale-wise. (That was tip “zero”.)
That said, it is worth trying is to create an environment as close as possible to what you would get with a co-located team. To do this, here are some things to try:
1. Set core hours (at least 3 contiguous) every day when everyone on the team, regardless of time zone, will be at work simultaneously. If you have a globally distributed team, this will mean that some team members will have to make an ongoing personal sacrifice to be available. This sacrifice should be compensated financially. Avoid rotating the core hours in the mis-guided idea that it is better that everyone is uncomfortable some of the time vs. some being uncomfortable all of the time. It is much easier for a team member to get used to a consistent schedule and although...read more
