The 2020s marked the beginning of a ‘work from home’ era, making more than 63% of companies adopt remote practices. Small businesses and enterprises started to hire dedicated remote developers for building and maintaining their digital products. They faced the need for Agile and Scrum adoption and such hurdles as remote management, planning, and communication.
In this article, we explore best practices of Agile for remote teams. You’ll find actionable tools to build efficient communication, smooth, trackable workflows, and doable planning.
The Importance of a Concept of Agile with Remote Teams
The Agile development principles are described in the Agile manifesto. They emphasise the importance of interpersonal collaboration inside the team and with stakeholders, working code, and responsiveness to changes in the projects. For people of all occupations working remotely, it brings flexibility, an iterative manner of task execution, and helps in quick adaptation to circumstances.
The Agile approach gives the space to tailor settings and processes to the particular team for better alignment. For example, a 2002 GitLab survey has shown that 82% of remote engineers name communication as the most challenging part of their work. Remote work environments like those used in the Scrum process don’t provide the possibility for face-to-face interaction.
The remote teams of Spotify solved a problem of communication by splitting the teams into smaller units within Scrum. It helped maintain clear goal understanding, transparency, and a controlled iterative process.
Best Practices of Agile Method for Communication and Collaboration
As effective communication influences the overall project success and works as a cornerstone of collaboration in distributed teams. To ease this process and build efficient collaboration, product owners combine communication tools and techniques for every separate team to achieve the best results:
- Leverage seamless tools. A combination of tools can work better than a single option. Using Slack for live chatting, Zoom for face-to-face communication, and Microsoft Teams for workflow management can boost the team’s productivity. You can even boost your Slack with a ticketing system to solve immediate issues.
- Encourage asynchronous communication. Smooth asynchronous communication is a must for work without overlapping time zones. It also reduces Zoom fatigue. Tools like Notion, Confluence, or even a corporate email will help to share updates and save documents.
- Use transparent documentation tools. Regular documentation maintenance helps to track progress and keep goals, decisions, and assignments within sight of an eye. The most often used tools are Jira, Confluence, and Google Docs.
- Schedule regular syncs. According to the project flow, teams and sub-teams can use daily, weekly, or bi-weekly standups, sprint planning and results demo sessions. The team-building activities can also be held online.
- Share progress and plans. Trello, Asana, Monday, or Jira are usually used to visualise all the tasks and progress in real time.
Techniques for Optimal Sprint Planning and Execution
When you work Agile with remote teams, well-defined and coordinated sprint planning will help to keep the team focused and move according to the roadmap, built at the project start. In addition, project management in this case is more complicated due to the time zone difference.
According to the experienced engineers, among the most efficient and effective methods of process control are:
- Precise meeting adjustments. Meeting time rotation helps share the burden of uncomfortable times. Overlap windows, when the most team members can be present, are usually scheduled for the most important general questions. Meeting records help every team member stay on the same wavelength.
- Distractions exclusion. Along with communication periods, the ‘focus hours’ help to increase productivity. They give individuals and teams guaranteed uninterrupted time for coding, which is, in fact, the core of product development.
- Clear goal setting. Even the best-motivated team needs to understand a big goal, as well as smaller milestones and sprint objectives. It helps to keep them focused and devoted, control their performance, and track the project progress.
- Milestone celebration. Even the small wins will boost the team’s morale and cheer your engineers up. Small virtual shout-outs and congratulations will also work as a team-building factor.
Remote Evaluation of Agile Success
Agile for remote teams is impossible without the evaluation of a development process. Regular feedback loops are a best practice you should look for if you a choosing the right outsourcing vendors.
Top software development experts also use regular one-to-one meetings to address blockers early and ensure mutual satisfaction of coders, managers, and stakeholders.
A gentle coaching in the Agile work also aimed at bridging the cultural differences, global teams communication gaps, and monitoring team morale. It will also help track such metrics as sprint velocity, cycle time, and team satisfaction, for further improvements.
The Potential of the Agile Way of Working
Mastering how to work Agile with remote developers, you will be able to utilise the benefits of the world’s talent pool and top IT vendors. The best practices we’ve gathered in this article are already adopted by the top market players like Spotify, Buffer, Zapier, and Atlassian, and they will help you achieve the next level of remote collaboration, too.
