What is it like to be Agile while working remotely? I am an Agile Coach working at home and I work with teams having members who also work from their homes. I have been working on this kind of environment and working setup for 8 years. In my current job, I am on my fourth year of being an Agile Coach. I have also worked as a Scrum Master for co-located teams so I have some experience working in an office setting. In the early years of my professional career, I have worked as a software engineer, as part of a development team in an office setting.
When you are used to applying Agile principles and following Agile frameworks, I think that gives you the versatility to work in any environment and be successful. I would like to share my perspective on what it is like to be Agile while working with remote teams. On this first blog for this series, I’ll talk about meetings in general.
Meetings
For me, scheduling a meeting involves creating a Google calendar event and inviting people to that event. Google Calendar has nice features which helps you pick a good time for the meeting you are creating. You can see the appointments people have on their calendars and you can even ask the app to find a good time slot for a meeting by telling it who you want to invite. The app allows you to schedule recurring meetings and this is what I do for standups, retrospectives, and planning meetings. I also make sure to set the correct timezone as I work with people in different countries.
We use Zoom for our online meetings. Instead of reserving a meeting room, I would just create a Zoom meeting instance. Going in the meeting room is done by clicking on a Zoom meeting URL. I would usually post the link on the Skype group chat of the team two minutes before the start of the meeting. I also post the Zoom URL on the Google Calendar event for the meeting so the attendees can access the link from there as well.
I am impressed with Zoom’s implementation on streaming video, voice and screen share during meetings. Internet speed is not great here in the Philippines but somehow on Zoom meetings we get great quality for voice. Greater still is that with Zoom, we can share video and do screen sharing without lags and problems with audio. This really helps in overcoming the challenges of communicating with your colleagues. It brings you closer to how the meeting would be if you are all in a room together. We would share video so that we can see each other rather than just hearing the voices of people we work with. Screen sharing is used to enhance discussions. In Zoom you can view a gallery of the video of participants and see the screen share at the same time, it’s like being in a room and having something presented via a projector.
Daily Standups
When we have the daily standups, we are actually just sitting down in our own home offices. Hahaha! We use Zoom for the meeting. Instead of looking at a physical board, we have our virtual Kanban board on our LeanKit instance. LeanKit allows us to coordinate our work and represent it on a Kanban board that we can all access and use.
What’s Next?
On my next blog post for this series, I’ll share more about retrospectives and how we do it remotely.
Remote Agility 