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How scrum teams can excel in a remote setting
- 1. How YOUR scrum team can excel in a remote setting
- 2. Introduction ● Sarah Finn ● sfinn@redhat.com ● Senior Agile Practitioner ○ CPE ● Agile & DevOps CoP Co-Manager ● Hina Popal ● hpopal@redhat.com ● Principal Agile Practitioner ○ RHV & CNV
- 7. Scrum can be your friend “Scrum helped coordinate communication between our distributed team. Scrum forces people to keep track of what is going on, and to focus on what the team needs to succeed.” - Dan Walsh “There is no such thing as a perfect process. However, Agile and Scrum can get you closer to the ideal as the team starts to go all in.” - Steve Milner
- 8. How can you help your team address these...
- 9. Focus on the best ways to collaborate and deliver instead of being a team who focuses on executing a predefined set of rules 9 Look Listen Respond
- 10. “Meetings are good for high-bandwidth communication, but they tie up a lot of people in one place for the length of the meeting. Invariably, meetings will leave someone out especially in remote teams because of timezones, other work that needs to be done, or conflicts with other meetings. It "costs" a lot for the meeting scheduler to find a time that fits the most key people in the right timeslot. To make it worth the cost, meetings should have a topic that is best discussed in a high-bandwidth setting, a defined outcome, and meeting documentation/minutes (you probably need to write these things down somewhere anyways!). “ - Brian Stinson “As a meeting organizer, weigh out the cost to you for setting up the meeting, and the cost to the attendees who have to prepare timeslots out of their day against something asynchronous." - Brian Stinson ➔ Have meetings with purpose. ◆ Determine if the meeting can be an email/group chat discussion. If it can be an email make it an email! ➔ Prioritise Scrum meetings - ensure your gaining value (clarity, information) from these. ➔ Have representatives to go to meetings where everyone doesn't need to attend ◆ Program meetings TOO MANY MEETINGS!
- 11. “ Since it's no longer possible for us to meet in person and have random hallway discussions, I felt that sometimes I didn't understand what my colleagues meant. There were times where the frustration was really high while the solution was simple: just talk to each other to understand what all sides really have in mind. I discovered that it's more effective to have a meeting and talk instead of writing comments in an issue tracker without seeing the body language on a camera.” - Tomas Tomecek “When the pandemic started and all our meetings went virtual, we slowly became disconnected emotionally as a team. It had an impact on our work morale - more tension, less joy. We decided to sparkle our standups with personal questions to start feeling connected again - the questions were as simple as "How was your weekend?", or "What was your favourite meal as a child?". And it worked! Suddenly I personally felt like I am looking forward what I'm going to learn next about my teammates.” - Tomas Tomecek ➔ Ping someone and to have an ad hoc video call to chat and align ➔ Hold optional open discussion sessions in place of a stand-up ➔ Carve out space in existing meetings to talk about fires, open questions, or things that make your head hurt ➔ Have fun with your meetings! Its ok to talk about hobbies, share music recommendations, share recipes, have a philosophical conversation about with young couples about having having kids vs having pets, etc Meetings can be your friend!
- 12. “ The difficulty with scrum (though it may not be exclusive to this framework) is that it can be nerfed with just a few people that don't choose to participate. Said another way, it is only as successful as the people who choose to adopt it; if you have resistance to the overall concept, it can be a difficult obstacle to overcome.” - Micah Abbott ➔ Define how you are going to work as a team. Instead of asking for agreement, ask if anyone objects. ◆ Team working agreements ◆ Document workflow ◆ Ask for folks to add a thumbs down, minus one, or “nack” (not ack) when they dont want something to be part of their process Remote Participation
- 13. Scrum Ceremonies
- 14. BACKLOG REFINEMENT 14 ➔ Traditional whiteboarding discussions are not possible ➔ Most of the team watches one or two people filling out user stories ➔ Divide work of pre-filling stories to the entire team so they don't rely on Product Owners and Tech leads. ➔ Tools are your friend & will help with collaboration. ➔ More engagement, more explorative questions, less blockers = deliver a better solution How can you address Common Issues Purpose: Design, define, and understand future work that the team is prioritizing in the next 3-6 months
- 15. SPRINT PLANNING 15 Purpose: Align and agree to the work that the team will complete in the next sprint cycle ➔ Sprint planning turns into a individual queue filling meeting ➔ Use your tool to queue up the next sprint and share with the team ahead of the sprint planning meeting ➔ Focus the meeting discussion around goals, gaining clarity & negotiating on commitments How can you address Common Issues
- 16. DAILY STAND UP 16 ➔ Finding a time slot to meet daily is a challenging when working across timezones ➔ People don't pay attention until their name is called. ➔ Mix between async standups and video/in person standups ➔ Create a chat channel for stand up conversations of overflow discussions ◆ Tag a team member so they can respond How can you address Common Issues Purpose: Quick check-in so everyone knows which work is progressing and are aware of any barriers “ Having team members tag each other vs. the scrum master call on people has made a huge difference on people paying attention and self-organizing.” - Jhon Honce
- 17. SPRINT REVIEW 17 ➔ People aren't sure what is worth sharing ➔ Team doesn't understand the value or the purpose of the sprint review ➔ Use an agenda! Ask each team member to volunteer ahead of time with specified topics ➔ Tag items to review during the sprint planning session. ➔ Invite PO and/or stakeholders to gain feedback How can you address Common Issues Purpose: Share work, celebrate as a team and gain feedback
- 18. SPRINT RETRO 18 ➔ Not everyone is involved - don’t see the value/point ➔ Remote silos/islands can hide what can be improved on ➔ Use a tool where your team has to actively add their feedback. ➔ Change up your retro formats. ◆ What went well, Lean Coffee, Happiness Index, Mad/Sad/Glad, Timeline Analysis ◆ Breakout sessions ◆ Team building, happy hour, lightning talks, hobby learning and sharing sessions ➔ Ensure you capture action items and take them on board in the next sprint cycle How can you address Common Issues Purpose: Inspect the process to see if there are ways to improve and share lessons learned
- 20. CAUTION!!! 20 Automation != communication alignment ➔ Too much automation can create a transactional environment Only focusing on individual work contributions = Silos ➔ People may not know how their work fits into the big picture ◆ Use tools to tell the story. ● Jira Portfolio view ● Roadmap visuals ● Parent/children hierarchies (features, epics, user stories) ◆ Focus on telling the story instead of the type of work that needs to be done ● Keep development work, qe work, and documentation work in the same epic
- 21. Do the humans have any questions?
- 22. CONFIDENTIAL Red Hat Internal linkedin.com/in/hina-popal twitter.com/hi_popal linkedin.com/in/sarahfinnpmi-acp/ twitter.com/SarahF_PMIACP Thank you 22 A special thank you to our wise collaborators @ashcrow @jwhonce @bstinsonmhk @rageear @rhatdan @TomasTomec