The notion of agile transformation has become increasingly popular in the software development world. However, the term “distributed agile teams” may be relatively novel to many.
What is a distributed agile team? What advantages are associated with distributed agile units? And what challenges can one face while operating a distributed agile team?
These questions are common nowadays, and we’ll discuss them all in this article.
Let’s start with the basics.
What is a Distributed Agile Team?
A distributed agile team is a team that is distributed across geographies and uses agile principles to work on projects. Distributed agile teams can be located in a single location or different locations, but with team members spread across different geographies.
The approach of a distributed agile team in accomplishing tasks is what makes it distinct from simply 'people working from home.' In addition to the advantages employees enjoy by working away from the office, the agile approach reinforces their efforts. This is particularly true for software development teams.
Following are the benefits of a distributed agile team:
Non-intimidating and relaxed environments are favorable for creativity.
Distributed agile team members can focus more on their tasks than office drama or politics.
The psychological benefits of family inclusion result in employees working harder (of course, for their families).
How do Distributed Agile Teams Work?
Distributed agile teams work in many of the same ways that in-house, co-located agile teams do. The key difference is the level of collaboration and the face-to-face interaction that exists between team members.
Distributed agile teams work best when there’s a regular collaboration between all team members to keep everyone on the same page. To do that, distributed agile teams use a number of different tools, like video call platforms, online collaboration tools, and virtual collaboration software.
Identifying Challenges in Distributed Teams
The appeal of distributed agile teams is obvious. It’s the ultimate win-win: teams are able to locate in different geographies, reducing travel time and costs while simultaneously increasing collaboration and efficiency. Distributed agile teams can be a great way to increase productivity and reduce friction.
Unfortunately, these types of teams aren’t always smooth sailing. They come with their own set of challenges that must be addressed for them to be successful.
Implementing Agile Methodologies Across Distributed Teams
The biggest challenge is getting distributed teams to collaborate and work together effectively. While some distributed agile teams may work totally in the background, others will be fully collaborative. The biggest challenge is making sure that everyone is on the same page.
Communications Challenges
When teams are in separate locations, communication can be a challenge. Distributed agile teams face a unique set of challenges due to the fact that team members are separated by distance. Time Zones can cause issues for teams that need to meet during certain hours. Internet connectivity can also cause problems for distributed teams.
Difficulty Finding the Right Talent
Finding the right distributed team members can be difficult, especially if you’re looking for members that are located in remote areas. Finding distributed team members can be more difficult than finding in-house team members.
8 Key Strategies for Successfully Implementing Distributed Agile Teams
There are a few things that distributed agile teams can do to ensure success. When implemented correctly, distributed agile teams can be a great way to improve your overall productivity and efficiency.
Here are the key strategies to implement distributed agile teams successfully:
1. Ensure Project Visibility Across Team
You cannot compromise on project status visibility in the agile world where requirements frequently change. Hence, it's one of the greatest challenges for distributed teams working agile.
Project managers/owners of distributed agile teams must ensure that their status reports are uploaded and clear before starting a new sprint cycle. It is the only way to capture a sprint's full effort and determine its status at the moment.
PMs often have difficulty retrieving project status information. This is also a problem with collocated teams, but it is exacerbated in a distributed environment. In such cases, distributed agile teams can use project management tools like JIRA to monitor project progress and provide better status visibility.
2. Clearly Define Team Roles and Responsibilities
One of the most important first steps is to define team roles and responsibilities clearly. Knowing who is responsible for what will help to keep the team on track and reduce confusion. This is something that distributed and co-located teams both need to do, but it is especially important for distributed teams.
Also, a distributed team culture will help distributed agile teams work together effectively. This includes figuring out how distributed teams will hold each other accountable, as well as how team members will learn and grow together. Having an established distributed team culture will help distributed agile teams succeed.
3. Use Appropriate Communication and Collaboration Methods
Distributed agile teams need communication methods to collaborate between team members.
Collaboration tools such as distributed source-code management, CI/CD tools, wikis, video conferencing, and chat platforms such as Slack are important for distributed teams to function effectively.
However, they cannot make even a low-performance team more effective. But without these tools, even an effective team may be less effective.
Hence, successfully implementing the collaboration technologies is key to a successful distributed agile team.
4. Recruit Highly Motivated Team Members
Because remote workers have to work harder to stay involved and productive, they must be exceptionally self-motivated.
Also, they’ll not have an informal network of co-located team members to rely on. As a result, they will have to make an extra effort to engage their remote colleagues.
5. Invest in Self-Organizing Teams
When creating a distributed team, assigning members to the team is the worst thing to do; it destroys motivation and kills initiative.
Since distributed work is even more difficult than co-located work—because it demands even more motivation—the distributed team must be strong, with individuals who are committed to the mission, the working methodology, and each other. That level of dedication doesn't occur by accident.
An important first step toward agile working is letting people choose to work together. People must want to work in an agile way, and they must also want to collaborate with one another.
Offer people the chance to volunteer and then bring them together to establish their working protocols and norms.
6. Minimize Hand-Offs and Wait Times
Time zones cause people to waste time waiting for one another to begin working the next day. These wait times add up and cause significant delays.
Daily stand-ups might help identify these problems, but the team must consider both today's work and potentially tomorrow's in order to know whether anything might inhibit their progress. Still, it won't be perfect, and some additional delays will be inevitable.
Reducing dependencies and refining the product backlog to spot potential conflicts earlier can help. In addition, with teams having members who could work on any product backlog item, blocking issues and slow hand-offs will be less frequent.
7. Nurture Agility
Agility is a way of thinking that must be continually nurtured in a software development setup. Every new product has a unique set of problems that can't be addressed in the same way repeatedly.
Because agile is a core element of development teams, they must be able to adapt to frequent changes in order to work collaboratively. This is why many companies hire agile coaches.
In addition, collaborating with remote groups outside your company is another technique for maintaining your team's agile effort.
8. Outsource to Experts
The process of agile transformation requires an experienced agile team. It’s true that you’ll spend a lot of money on hiring, training, and so on to create an agile team.
Even if you are careful with your talent procurement, you may not even have the perfect team after hiring, inductions, training, and so on.
You may find yourself doing everything but creating the product you planned on making. Outsourcing makes it easier to manage your resources, and as a result, you can focus more on improving what you've made.
In addition, an agile remote workforce brings more value to your workforce because of their past work.
But where do you source your agile team from?
The answer is CodeMonk.
CodeMonk is a technical staffing platform that helps companies scale their technology teams by providing a global pool of expert candidates incentivized to deliver their best work.
The best part is that CodeMonk isn’t just another staffing firm. With features like a talent marketplace, team formation, comprehensive talent matching, and an application tracking system, CodeMonk makes it effortless for CIOs to hire distributed agile tech teams.
Distributed Agile is the Way Forward
It may appear to be a complicated procedure, but managing a distributed agile team is actually quite simple.
Your employees are people, not just resources for completing your job. You must keep this in mind at all times.
While adopting the pointers we've given you, you'll find that managing a distributed agile team will function and operate much better if you maintain a 'people first' mindset.
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