program selection system

This session is presented by a group of panelists – Esther Derby, Hubert Smits, Tamara Sulaiman, Samir Shah and Monica Yap. All of the panelists have experience working with successful distributed Agile teams, from offshore and onshore. They will share their experience and insights on how to face the common challenges arise from this environment. Topics such as how to start well, how to deal with time zones, will be discussed. During the session, the panelists will also answer specific questions from attendees.

Each of the panelists has worked with or trained teams in geographically (sometimes international) distributed environments. Esther brought up the first distributed team at American Express. Monica worked with distributed teams (US, UK, Singapore) through many projects. Hubert and Tamara trained distributed teams in AOL across Dulles and Bangalore. Contradictory to the common belief that an agile team should be co-located physically, these teams worked in extremely distributed environments, and they have good successes using agile methods, with frequently delivered working software.

However, there are many challenges making distributed teams and their projects successful. Each of the panelists have discovered some common challenges, such as cultural differences, technical infrastructure required to support the remote teams, lag in communication due to time zone differences, unable to have face to face communication, trust issues. The panelists will share their experience and insights as to how they’ve solve or mitigate these issues, for example jump start the project team together in a boot camp, use of video communication tool to provide high bandwidth communication.

In this panel discussion, topics such as the following will be discussed:

• How to start well with distributed teams?
• Recognizing and dealing with the impact of culture on distributed teams?
• What are the technical infrastructure and tooling required?
• How to deal with time zone issues?
• How to build team trust or trust with the customer?
• Techniques for building and strengthening distributed teams
• How to fix collaboration issues between team members in a distributed agile project
• How to detect when there is a problem in a distributed team project? Is a burn down chart effective enough?
• What is the cost difference between co-located and distributed teams? Is the cost worth the value earned?
• What are the challenges with product backlog and what are the remedies

Attendees are also welcome to bring their specific questions related to their context.