3 Agile Ways Remote Teams Can kickstart 2017

It’s that time of the year in which teams get together and plan for the next four quarters. This is important because team members can provide their input on what they have learned from their experience from last year.

At PlanningWith.Cards we receive lots of feedback from users and the community at Nearsoft (our parent company) which we then analyze and create action items for the coming quarters. In this post we would like to share with you four agile ways to incorporate this process in your remote, distributed or local team.

Discipline & Feedback

This is one of the pillars of great teams is that they work in ways that they can scale their activities, one of them being the source control of their code, which is a trait of a truly disciplined professional developer.

Some important factors of source control are:

• Checking-in on a regular basis.
• Comments on the code, so that the entire team knows what it does.
• Branching and merging, segregating code on the needs of the business.

We get together with the development team to discuss the opportunities to enhance our internal processes, so we can incorporate developers much quicker or assign issues that require less onboarding time for our teammates.

Feedback is one of the most valuable activities in our team. That is why we do a retrospective of the whole year. We obtain a lot of great feedback from it as well as actionable items. Following up on them and seeing them through takes discipline from each team member, every indiviual needs to feel empowered by everyone of their teammates.

One of the challenges is making the feedback valuable both to the team as well as individually. Here are some ways to make it stick:

Say Thank You often.

It is important to express gratitude for your team’s effort, but making it public encourages everyone to follow along and making the team more open to receive feedback.

Saying Please.

Sometimes time and urgencies get in the way of asking for things in a polite way. Empathy is important to consider when you need something from one of your team mates.

Having conversations around these simple phrases is an incentive to promote smooth flow of information, to make quicker decisions and to make each member be more receptive to peer requests.

User (Design) at the Core of All

Many call it User Centered-Design, but for our team, who is focused on helping remote teams succeed, we need to stay open to the “no two users are alike” idea. We have understood that each user has his own unique perspective on what our tool does for them.

So every year we get together to understand what the future needs might be from those users that see our software from the front and back view of the agile platform. Those who input their estimates on the PlanningWith.Cards HipChat add-on or Hangouts plugin and those who view the information being pushed on the integrations with JIRA, Trello, Pivotal or Youtrack project management software.

The great thing about agile is that you can test out concepts for each of them to come up with new proposals for features or brand new solutions. This is exactly how our Agile Retrospectives Confluence add-on got proposed and is now live in the Atlassian Marketplace.

We think of our users as the principal source for inspiration of new features, they are at the center of it all.

Metrics & Expiration Dates

One can easily get lost on Key Performance Indicators and metrics if you let them become eternal drivers of the product development cycle. This is a great post on metrics from Yarev Schmonz that is worth a look. In it he talks about the benefit of imposing expiration dates on metrics.

Sometimes we choose metrics or KPIs that may not apply down the life cycle of the product, or those metrics made sense to observe user behaviour for implemented features and should not continue to be measured after sometime, it was an opportunity to observe certain traits of our users. Putting a due date on the analysis also places a termination date so as to make it easier to decide whether we should either drop it or continue if there is any value in measuring it.

It will make your team respond much quicker to future feature implementations and make your product development accountable for the results that validate their hypothesis for their feature requests.

With these three agile ways you will find that your team will make small improvements that if applied rigorously, they can provide the desired results for 2017.

One more thing: on January 18th the guys at Dojo Live will be hosting Lisette Sutherland who is the book author of “Stories Of Remote Teams Doing Great Things” in a live podcast at 2 p.m. Mountain Standard Time. Don’t miss it!

Happy 2017 planning!