At a glance
Working Effectively in Geographically Distributed Agile Project Teams
Getting the most out of a geographically distributed team
Geographically distributed projects are a reality in many organisations today; teams spread across multiple locations - diverse cities, states, countries, cultures and time zones.
Getting the most out of a geographically distributed team is a challenge, one that is brought into sharp focus when Agile methods are used. Agile techniques place an emphasis on close collaboration and working together to deliver business value, but how do you achieve the levels of collaboration necessary when the team is spread across various locations, with testers in Brisbane, developers in Sydney, customers in Auckland and management in Melbourne?
This hands-on two-day course provides you with an intensive and immersive learning experience which will give you an understanding of the challenges facing distributed Agile teams. It will show you how to address these challenges in order to create the most productive and effective team environment possible, enabling your distributed teams to deliver business value faster, better and cheaper!
Intended For
Managers, project managers, ScrumMasters, iteration managers, product owners, business stakeholders, designers, architects, business & systems analysts, testers, developers, technical writers and anyone working with or on a distributed Agile team.Prerequisites
This course has no prerequisites.Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course you will have a clear understanding of the challenges facing distributed teams, and how those challenges can be addressed using Agile techniques.
You will be armed with a toolkit of ideas, techniques and tools to address these challenges, and will know how to set up and prepare distributed teams to enable their success - success for the project, the organisation and for the individual team members.
Content
Introduction
- Elicit your specific problems now
Simulations: Geographically distributed projects.
(These projects and their associated debrief last an entire day)
- Project 1: Entire team is distributed. Product owner, developers, testers are all in different places
- Project 2: Product owner is with developers, testers are in another location
- Project 3: Cross-functional teams with their own product owner working towards one common deliverable
Five levels of planning and how that plays out in a distributed project
- Product owners and the Product vision, product road map
- Technical project team: Release plan, Iteration plan, Daily commitment
- Discussions and activity in the context of a project
Program vs. project management
- Ways to bring together multiple Agile teams
- Activity: Project in the way the class wants
What makes sense for you to do?
- Alternative lifecycles
- How to move to Agile, step by step, depending on what the simulation shows you
- Product owners and their special issues
- People issues, including building trust across time and space
Solving your problems
- Answer the problems based on what you learned in the simulations
Summary and wrap-up
Method Used
This course is interactive and hands-on. Over the two days we run a simulated project in distributed teams, identifying and exploring the challenges and addressing them - you will learn by doing and will come away confident of your ability to put the learnings into practice in your project environment.
