This document discusses the challenges of applying Scrum to dispersed teams and provides practices to help address those challenges. The key challenges are differing time zones, cultural diversity, communication difficulties, technical misalignments, managerial issues, and lack of trust across locations. Practices to help include overlapping work hours, exchanges between locations, video conferencing, transparent shared information, remote pairing, common practices, no distinction between locations, and individual plus joint retrospectives.

1. Challenges In Applying Scrum on
Dispersed Team
Thang Nguyen
Scrum Master, Coach @ DEK
Technologies 1

2. Agenda
 Situation
 Challenges
 Success practices
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3. Situation
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Co-located team
Distributed team
Dispersed team

4. Why do we need dispersed team?
 Look for talent all over the world
 Special skills in another location
 Cost-savings
 Access to new market
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5. Agile Values
 Individuals and interactions over processes and tool
 Working software over comprehensive documentation
 Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
 Responding to change over following a plan
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6. 12 Agile Principles
 …
 The most efficient and effective method of conveying
information to and within a development team is face-to-
face conversation.
 …
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7. SCRUM Framework
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8. SCRUM in Dispersed Team
 The principles and practices of Scrum in dispersed team
are no different from the principles and practices of
Scrum in a single-location.
 Simply Scrum, but with added challenges.
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9. 9

10. Challenge #1: Time zone differences
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 Conflicting work hours
 Parallel work
 Work allocation and scheduling

11. Challenge #2: Cultural diversity
 Iceberg model
◦ External culture is easy to understand and change
◦ Internal culture is more difficult to understand
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12. Challenge #3: Communication
 Is a challenge in traditional agile environment
 Even more difficult in dispersed team
◦ Most of communication is non-verbal
◦ Lost or misunderstood information
◦ Difference in language
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13. Challenge #4: Technical alignments
 Misalignment in engineering best practices can also
create conflicts between team members.
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14. Challenge #5: Managerial issues
 How to engage all members in the development
process?
 Difficulties in share project information to all team
members
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15. Challenge #6: Trust
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 Easy to blame and criticize the other groups and the
team can break down into competing tribes.

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17. Practice #1: Overlapping Work Hours
 Document the time zone differences and ranges
 Determine a core-time range for all geographically
dispersed team members
 Overlapping working hours needs to be established as
much as possible.
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18. Practice #2: Exchanging program
 Regular visits by sending members to other location will
foster collaboration
 Enhance understanding and also creates personal trust
between team members
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19. Practice #3: Communication
 Video conference should be used as much as possible
 Communication tools:
◦ Instant message: Skype, hipchat, …
◦ Desktop sharing: Lync, Bluejeans, …
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20. Practice #4: Transparent information
 Single source for information across all teams to foster
greater understanding among team members.
 The knowledge base should be accessible online in real
time by all locations
◦ Wiki
◦ Shared mailing list and folder
◦ Online project management tools
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21. Practice #5: Remote pairing
 Pair with another remote team member which can lead
to great knowledge transfer.
 The understanding was much deeper and an immediate
bond was created between the two who paired
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22. Practice #6: Engineering best practices
 Establish a set of common best practices across all
remote teams.
 Scrum Master must facilitate and ensure agreement
from all remote teams.
 Reinforce the trust and shared values between team
members.
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23. Practice #7: No class system
 No distinction should be made between team members
at different locations.
 With a class system, it will lower the trust relationship
between teams.
 The ‘lower’ class will always feel that they are left out.
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24. Practice #8: Individual sprint
retrospectives
 Conduct individual sprint retrospectives at the end of
each sprint at each location and then will conduct a joint
retrospective
 Members at each location looks individually at what
needs to be improved and how, by who.
 In the joint retrospective, only focus on those things that
are of interest for the whole team.
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25. Q&A
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26. Contact
 Skype: nbthang_bk
 Linkedin: https://vn.linkedin.com/in/bathangnguyen
 Email: nbthang_bk@yahoo.com
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