Overcoming the Challenges of a Distributed Organization
Revised Proposal
Agile principles value people and communication over processes and tools. But, how do you manage the complexity of today’s development environment where teams span multiple time zones, continents and languages and successfully adapt Agile processes in such a way that teams reach optimal velocity? How do you facilitate communication and foster team-building? How can you empower each team member when the Scrum Master and Product Owner are located with one half of the team?
Learn how you can adapt standard Agile processes in the offshore development environment to achieve predictable results – Quality Software, On Schedule! Join Elaine Therrien, Director of Product Management at First American CoreLogic and Michele Sliger, Founder of Sliger Consulting Inc. in an interactive session where they will present an experience report that will showcase how a distributed development team effectively adapted Agile processes to build and maintain commercial software solutions that serve thousands of end users.
In this session you will learn:
- The key challenges that a distributed team faced when they tried to adopt the Agile/Scrum process.
- How did the team overcome the time zone, and cultural challenges to foster good communication among all team members?
- How did the team build trust among team members that have never met?
- How did the distributed environment impact the role of Product Owner and Scrum Master?
- How the team adapted the standard Agile/Scrum process for the distributed development environment.
- Examples and recommendations on how to best conduct your standard Agile/Scrum daily meetings, backlog scrubbing meetings, release and sprint planning meetings, and release and sprint reviews with co-located teams.
- How to overcome the time zone and the challenges of daily meetings.
- How to facilitate communication with the time zone gap so that team velocity is not impaired.
- How the team built trust and empowered each team member.
- Recommendations on how to adapt the role of Scrum Master slightly to improve team effectiveness in both locations.
- Examples of technologies and tools have proven to be most effective in supporting team building in the virtual environment.
— Old Proposal—-
Agile principles value people and communication over processes and tools. But, how do you manage the complexity of today’s development environment where teams span multiple time zones, continents and languages and successfully adapt Agile processes in such a way that teams reach optimal velocity?
Learn how you can adapt standard Agile processes in the offshore development environment to achieve predictable results – Quality Software, On Schedule! Join Elaine Therrien, Director of Product Management at First American CoreLogic and Michele Sliger, Founder of Sliger Consulting Inc. in an interactive session where they will present two real-life case studies that showcase how two virtual development teams effectively adapted Agile processes to build and maintain commercial software solutions that serve thousands of end users.
In this session you will learn: • How to effectively adapt standard Agile/Scrum processes for the distributed development environment. • Proven examples on how to best conduct your standard Agile/Scrum daily meetings, backlog scrubbing meetings, release and sprint planning meetings, and release and sprint reviews with virtual teams. • How to overcome the time zone and meeting challenges. • How to facilitate communication so that team velocity is not impaired. • How the virtual environment impacts the role of Product Owner and Scrum Master. • How do you build trust within a virtual team? • Which tools have proven to be most effective in supporting the virtual environment?
This will be an interactive session where we will present an experience report that provides an overview of the team and their situation, their key challenges and issues, our lessons learned and recommendations and then engages the audience by posing several of these issues for applying Agile processes in a distributed environment and then enlist them for alternative solutions.