Agile Distributed Teams
Attendees will learn techniques for joining and setting up “well formed teams” across distances, and how they can be applied. These ideas are built on proven principles of systems thinking, team process concepts, agile product development, human interaction and creativity.
Why?
Agile methodologies warn how critical it is to co-locate teams in the same room, but this is not always practical. Distributed, distant, or “virtual” teams are a reality of business today. Offshoring, flex-work schedules, multiple corporate offices, and other forces create pressures to achieve results even when team members are scattered across the globe.””
Participants will learn strategies based our re-world applied distributed agile experiecnce made tangible for helping teams overcome old habits of waterfall(rigid thought or process focused) behavior. There are many classic example of waterfall behavior. For example, we have seen long cycle times and endless revision of requirements churn are the norm, status reporting takes up far too much time, and individual leaders dominate the team. Management direction gets lost in a sea of process and tools instead of manifesting as tangible, quality product.
How can we realize the benefits of Agile product development - hyperproductivity, high-quality products, self-organization, elimination of waste, and rapid releases - when team members are not sitting next to each other?
This is the challenge of business in the 21st century: how to work effectively at a distance. This seminar is where you can start to meet that challenge: how to create and sustain tightly-knit, effective Agile distributed teams.
Learning Objectives
- Enabling the power of self-organization - working with the component forces of distributed development to “pull” the team rather than “push” them
- Agile attractors and Dimensions of Distribution- universal forces of effective product development, values for basic human interaction, and how to negotiate the complexities of team interaction face-to-face or miles apart
- Setting up and improving your team’s protocols - examples of protocols that work for collocated teams vs. those that work for distributed teams, and criteria for evaluating your own team protocols
- Improving collaborative behavior - leveraging multiple feedback loops both within the team and with those outside the team
If this is delivered presented to a large audience (50+) then it would be classic presentation with light Q&A encouraged throughout.
I would like to break this up into small group discussions (5-7 at a table) and then shift back to larger group summary. This format allows participants to personalize the information presented with a stronger feeling of value. I can orchestrate this well only for groups less than 45.
Co-Presenter: Derek Wade Then we will demonstrate agile thinking through an interactive dialog and we can handle a larger format for small group discussion break out with large group summary (60-70 folks with small group discussions).
We typically deliver our seminars using the above format.