Suddenly Distributed:

Agile from Home

As the world shifts from co-located offices to distributed work from home, more and more questions are arising from the agile community. As your remote agile advocates, we have compiled a comprehensive list of resources to help you adjust to unprecedented circumstances and address first-time challenges

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FAQs

Check out our frequently asked questions below or ask our community of experts!

How do you achieve “osmotic communication” and group awareness when distributed ?

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Create a virtual space and keep the conversations going between meetings, remembering that just because the meeting is over doesn’t mean communication should stop. Dedicate a team Slack channel for each team to keep the conversations flowing in one place throughout the day. This dedicated backchannel becomes part of the team’s virtual space.

In a situation of little trust, how do you create trust between clients and vendors while in isolation?

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One of the easiest ways to build trust is through empathy, emotional understanding, and of course - constant communication. Video calls, non-work related chats, and open and honest conversation will all help to build trust between one another. Clients and vendors are just as human as your team. Teach out to them and see how they are doing in this difficult time.

What are some things we can say or do to help with guidance ?

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To all of you that are leaders, be kind, be understanding, and let people know it's okay to be vulnerable,” said Charles Humble of InfoQ.com, “a little bit of kindness goes a really long way.”

What about people who are not willing to share the fear. How to open the conversation.

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It is not easy to talk about fears, especially, if a team doesn’t have a habit of discussing their feelings together. A first step
towards developing that habit could be using a CheckIn Protocol (mad, sad, glad, afraid), asking team members to select
one of the Story Cubes to show how they feel at the beginning of this meeting etc.
Next step is to play The Fear in the Workplace game. In addition to the Fear and Fear Symptoms, the game has “Classify
Me” cards. These cards contain scenarios and quotes of what people say when they work in places affected by fears. By
reviewing someone else’s scenarios and identifying matching fears, participants practice having discussions on this often
difficult topic

Do you have any realistic approaches to working on a team that is globally distributed?

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“realistically”, you may not be able to use a completely agile approach, but you may be able to use some
alternative techniques combined with agile techniques. However, the most “realistic” approach is asking why do you
need these particular people on the team? Can you reform teams or subteams or add people in some of the locations so
they can have a full team. Also see my prior answer to “choosing tools and overlapping core hours.”

What tools or resources can be used to effectively replace "white boarding" in a virtual meeting?

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Using a shared Google Doc as a virtual whiteboard is a great way to replicate this exercise virtually. There are other great tools such as Miro and MURAL which give you a near infinite whiteboard.

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