The document discusses challenges and success practices for agile dispersed teams. Some of the key challenges include time zone differences which make collaboration difficult, cultural diversity between locations, challenges with communication as most is non-verbal, technical misalignments, and lack of trust between distant members. Successful practices include establishing overlapping work hours, exchanging team members between locations, using video conferencing and communication tools, sharing information transparently, pairing remote members, agreeing on engineering practices, treating all members equally, and conducting individual and joint retrospectives.

1. Challenges and success practices
for agile dispersed team
Presenter: Thang Nguyen
Scrum Master, Coach @ DEK Technologies
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2. Agenda
 Agile dispersed team
 Challenges
 Success practices
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3. Agile dispersed team
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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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8. Challenge #1: Time zone differences
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 Conflicting work hours
 Parallel work
 Work allocation and scheduling

9. 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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10. Challenge #3: Communication
 Is a challenge in traditional agile environment
 Even more difficult in distributed team
◦ Most of communication is non-verbal
◦ Lost or misunderstood information
◦ Difference in language
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11. Challenge #4: Technical alignments
 Misalignment in engineering best practices can also
create conflicts between team members.
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12. Challenge #5: Managerial issues
 How to engage all members in the development
process?
 Difficulties in status monitoring, management
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13. 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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15. 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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16. 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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17. 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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18. 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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19. 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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20. 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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21. 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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22. Practice #8: Individual 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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23. Q&A
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