This document provides tips for leading distributed teams and facilitating online collaboration when working remotely. Some key tips include communicating more frequently with direct reports, celebrating successes, using communication channels like newsletters and intranets to increase belonging, planning shorter and more frequent meetings, preparing for meetings in advance, and using online tools to facilitate activities like planning, retrospectives, and mapping stories.

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Tips for online collaboration
Fried Broekhof
How to conduct effective online Agile Events
Amsterdam • March 2020

2. Tips to lead distributed teams
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• Communicate more and more often; direct reports might feel left out
and will feel the need to be informed
• Communicate one-on-one with direct reports; show interest in personal
and individual issues
• Schedule online coffees with direct reports
• Create a newsletter for your Business Unit or ‘Tribe’ and send messages
Leadership Team
• Have a sharp eye on where and how to improve your collaboration
• Celibrate succes more than you are used to; people will feel the need for
belonging; sharing succes will stimulate this

3. Communication
• As an organization, BU or Tribe, you need to communicate more frequent
than you are used to
• You need to increase the belonging of our employees
• Possible channels :
• Newsletter
• Digital BU Standup
• Intranet landing page
Possible content is:
• Fun; e.g. sent in a picture of your early morning
coffee or a picture of your digital workspace
• Votes & quizes
• Chapter updates
• Updates and tips on online tooling
• Good practices
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4. General tips to facilitate digital collaboration
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Team communication
• Plan time to collaborate with your team
mates
• Plan virtual coffee moments with your
colleaques
• Set up communication channel for regular
‘chit-chat’
Frequency of meetings
• Rule of thumb is to do more shorter
meetings of maximum 1 hour
• Agree before a meeting or a session on
general rules
• e.g. close all other apps on your
computers
Preparation
• Plan some time –e.g. 5 minutes- to prepare
and to check all online connections
• Prepare the meeting even more in advance
Meetings
• Start with a check-in, every meeting, since
these are different times
• Appoint a facilitator for every meeting, please
do rotate the facilitator
• Close your other windows during the
meetings, as they might distract, especially
news channels
• Don’t try to rush; online meetings
• it might take some more time, especially
in the beginning
• One speaker at a time; there is a delay in
sound
• Close your meeting with a short check-out

5. Daily Standup
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You are probably allready very accustomed to the
Daily Standup.
It’s a great way to align on the planning for that day.
Please be careful that the Standup will not end-up in a
status meeting, because it’s not.
However, since working fully remote is new to us all,
please do take time for a check in of every team
member. If that means, that the Standup will take five
minutes longer, so be it.

6. Sprintplanning
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• If you are working Agile, then you’re probably used to working with a
Backlog Management tool like Jira or a more basic tool like Trello,
during the Planning Meeting. If not; please start NOW
• Working remote works best, when meetings are well prepared. This is
very applicable to the Sprint Planning Meeting as well
• Be sure that you have refined and estimated (Planning Poker) all the
Stories for the next Sprint in your Backlog Management tool
• Some tips to prepare well:
• All Stories that are Done, are closed
• All Stories that are NOT done, are known and can be moved to the
next Sprint
• The PO has all the Stories for the Next Sprint already prioritized in
the Sprint backlog, meeting the DoR
• The Team has prepared the availability of the team for next Sprint,
and thereby the amount of Story points the team can commit to can
easily be calculated

7. Proper and clear backlog refinement is always important, but working remote requires
even more discipline in our backlog refinement.
We advice you to plan a Backlog Refinement more frequently than you’re used to;
preferably twice a week, for 45 minutes per session
As advocated often, it’s a good practice to perform Planning Poker during the Refinement
sessions, NOT during the Sprint Planning.
A free online tool you can use is scrumpoker online; https://www.scrumpoker.online/
Backlog Refinement
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8. Retrospective
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Now, more than ever, it’s crucial to spend time on how you can improve as a team. Please
also pay attention to the more ‘soft side’ of team performance. Make time to ask how
everyone is feeling and if there is anything you as a team mate can do to help.
There are many free online tools available. You probably all know ideaboardz.com
Also try something different the coming weeks.
Pay extra attention on how the new situation is impacting your team members.
An example of another free online tool you can use is:
https://funretro.io/
There are many different retroboard available. You can vote. You can change the order. It’s
all realtime. You can use three public boards for free.

9. Daily Coffee Break
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Social interactions are a very important part of our daily live. From time to
time we need to take a break and have some chit-chat with a colleague,
preferably near the coffee machine.
Please, do invite your colleagues from time to time for some social
interaction. This might also be time to discuss the news.
Do share funny information via Whatsapp to your squad-members or use
the Skype Chat.
You could als consider setting up mattermost with your squad. It’s free, it
runs on the ING network and it’s set-up in just a few minutes;
https://mattermost.ing.net/mra/channels/town-square

10. Sprint review
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Sprint reviews are the best way to interact
with your stakeholders, to receive direct
feedback on what you’ve been working on.
And on what you want to do for the next
Sprint.
A good practice to have a standard one pager
to send out to your stakeholders, containing
information like:
• Velocity trend
• Progress towards objectives
• Team happiness (measure it every Sprint!)
• Stakeholder happiness
• Delivered Stories/Features
• Impediments and actions
Especially now we are working remote,
please do send out the Sprint Review
Reports every Sprint to your stakeholders.
You’re stakeholders will love you for it!

11. User story- or feature mapping
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A very good practice to breakdown your
Epics into features and Features into
Stories, is Feature- and Storymapping.
Feature mapping is an ideal way to
create a Roadmap for your Product,
Program or team.
Storymapping is ideal for creating a
breakdown of your features for the
upcoming 3 months (QBR-commitment).
A useful online tool to collaborate with
multiple team members online is called
miro.comUsing the free version of miro.com; you can use 3
boards and invite up to 15 team members.