How to support a collaborative atmosphere in distributed projects?
After running a similar workshop with about 20 participants on XP2007 it became clear that getting distributed agile projects right is still a challenge. We got the impression that the community has definitely started to test and execute distributed agile projects. This is obviously driven by the offshoring trend. The interesting phenomenon we are observing is that it is the quality and collaboration aspects of agile practices that leads to an interest in agile practices despite the initial belief that distributed projects would need a more structured waterfallish approach.
Both organizers joined large organizations a coupe of years ago where there still was a strong faith in waterfallish approaches; in particular with distributed projects. However, due to huge challenges in managing distributed offshore projects and poor quality, these organizations now insist on agile practices to get better control of quality and progress of these projects.
The improvement on quality and management have already started to surface. Still we are seeing that it is still challenging to establish a truly collaborative atmosphere due to the nature of distributed work. As would be expected as distributed work is in theory a violation of an important principle of most agile methodologies; co-located teams. We believe this area still to be in its infacy, and it would be of great importance to share experiences, challenges and ideas on how to overcome these challenges. The litterature that exists at this time seems to focus more on additional management disciplines; and less on how to achieve the collaborative atmosphere that the agile practices depend so much on, so it would be of great interest to dive into that area.
What do those who succeed in doing this do differently from those who don’t? The neccessary compromises may have a significant influence of the outcome. Experience on this has been made for a couple of years now, and we want to explore what challenges exists and share experiences on what works and what doesn’t, and why that is. We call this a real-life retrospective as we believe we need more than one project to be able to learn enough from these experiences.
Expected participants
Based on our experiences from XP2007 we would expect practitioners with a range of experience from a couple of years of distributed agile to just started and seeing what kind of challenges that needs to be dealt with. This range is very welcome, and we would also require a strong interest and commitment to engage in discussions on how to move forward. We believe the time should be right to expect such commitment. This will be an intense session, but highly rewarding in terms of coming up with specific guidance and experience on this important challenge. A group of 20-30 participants will work great with this format.
Popular mistakes, ideas that could be among the ones we want to explore:
- Clear distinction between the offshored team and the onshore team OR the complete opposite; tight integration and tight collaboration despite the distance
- The state of collaborative tools, and how can they be taken advantage of (e.g. do Jazz adress the right challenges, why are chatting, webcams and other collaborative tools not sufficient etc.)
- Does continuous build/integration scale across geographies OR do we need extra management/procedures for this
- Scrum of Scrums - what are the practical experiences; we have done this for a couple of years now; what other practices exists
- A quick round among each participant where everybody states one good and one bad experience
- Divide into 2 groups; one discussing and exploring the positive experience, the other discussing and exploring how the bad experiences could improve. The participants choose which group to join based on their own preference.
- Each group sums up the discussion and present to the other group.
- Divide into two new groups to continue the discussion based on these findings; the participants may change group at this time.
- Each group sums up again to finalize the outcome of this workshop
This session is deliberately short to keep the energy and intensity high at all times, and we really want to focus on having a positive retrospective session and avoid any whining session. The organizers will play an active role throughout this workshop to share our own experiences, opinions and to keep the pace.