Agile from Home

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.

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.”

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

“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.”

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.