Scrum Of Scrum Overseas

SCRUM OR SCRUM OVERSEAS. MAKING IT ALL WORK WITH NOT COLLOCATED TEAM Stanislav Vasilyev Aqris Software

ABOUT ME…
9 years in commercial software development
Developed software products for over than 10 different companies
ScrumMaster and coach at Aqris Software
Lean and Agile to the bones
Email me: stanislav.vasilyev@aqris.com

AGENDA
History of a team
Difficulties at the beginning
Baby steps
Lessons learned
Things that are complicated to achieve
Conclusions

STORY OF A TEAM
Launched in the mid 2006
Team divided between Tallinn and Helsinki
Initially planned as a pilot project for 6 months, having a goal of improving the current system
Started as a 4 people project with half of a team knowing nothing about the domain and Scrum

THREE YEARS LATER, TODAY…
Team size of 8 (divided on two locations)
… plus operations team of 7 in the third location
Stable and predictable velocity
Performance comparable with the collocated teams
Motivated and dedicated people working together from two companies delivering one product

HOT START
Begun with a 2 people in Tallinn starting on a project
Experienced team leader from the customer side moved in with the new team to establish knowledge transfer
Immediately focused on making the Scrum team work – team in Tallinn had no experience
Shared single backlog between all members

FIRST CRISIS
In three months the newly created team was left alone
Resulted in velocity drop, team fell back to the storming phase
Team has to rebuild relationships on distance
Situation similar to starting project over again

NEW ORDER – IMPROVISE!
Team had one ScrumMaster
… but there was one more ScrumMaster to take care of the second half of a team
Traditions for the whole team to bind people together over distance
Missed point: we stopped seeing each other for a long time

NEXT CRISIS
Knowledge started to accumulate in areas of responsibilities:
Production system in Helsinki
Development in Tallinn
People started to lose the feeling of owning product

SOLUTION – SHUFFLE THE TEAM AGAIN
Back to forming and storming!
Add more people to Helsinki, distribute development tasks evenly
Production problems cannot be solved by half of the team
No areas of expertise! Fully cross functional!

MORE THINGS THAT ARE NOT EASY
How to keep daily stand-up meeting within 15 minutes?
… and still get the feeling that you are one team?
Have you tried daily stand-up in the chat room?
Different cultures, working styles and working time
Personal relationships

WHAT WE KNOW SO FAR
Distributed team is inert
That can be used to its benefit
Keeping all people in the same information field makes people care
Meet when you can, use video conferencing always
Use the phone, do not send email

GROUND RULES FOR THE TEAM
Meet for retrospective and planning
Establish personal contact
Create new traditions that are valid for the team
Team culture
“ Never drop the ball”

.. AND EVEN MORE RULES
Act as a single team, despite several locations
Share the same backlog
Share the same scrum board
Focus on the job that should be done, not on the contract

VELOCITY
We have always experimented with definition of a story point
Roughly, distributed team performs the same way as if it would have been collocated
Proved by comparing to results achieved when the team was collocated
Also, several sprints were made by the team at the same location
Distributed – does not mean slower!

OUR IMPEDIMENTS
Short sprints are not feasible
Travelling takes time from the sprint
Getting even more agile
Visualizing the value stream is technically complicated
Limiting Work In Progress works better with collocated team

IMPROVISE!
Perfect is an enemy of good enough!
After all, distributed team implies that people cannot be on the same location
Experiment with what can you achieve
If you will make people care the rest will follow
Try again

CONSTANTLY IMPROVE
Scrum teams can implement Lean principles in a greater extend
Over time user stories become approximately the same complexity, that eliminates estimations
Pull technique - planning on site with ProductOwner eliminates prioritization
That gives you possibility to focus on what is valuable right now

CONCLUSIONS
It is still all about people
Prefer personal contact, use video where possible
Visual information carries 80% of information
Trust people and create self-improvement culture
Improvise! Try again!

QUESTIONS?
Thank You!
[email_address]

Scrum Of Scrum Overseas

by Agileee on Oct 12, 2009

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