[Thang nguyen] Best practices for Agile dispered team

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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