Engaging Remote Teams with the New Normal

The year is 2019, the popularity of Scrum has continued to grow over recent years. You’ve got to be Agile if you want to hang out with the cool kids, let’s face it, who hasn’t got a Scrum Certification in this day and age?! But now we are certified, we have our Scrum team set up, we’ve got our automated CI/CD pipelines running and we are all attending the daily stand up at 9 am sharp every day on Skype. Wait, what? You cannot run a pure Agile project unless you are co-located, everyone knows that!

Ok then, let’s get a team room, a stack of post-its, and a real sprint board. We can stick our Definition of Done on the wall. We can do pair programming with two developers and one keyboard. We can even do mob programming in our team room, nothing is holding us back, so sit back and watch us deliver great things!

The year is 2020, we cannot go to the steam room, there is a Pandemic! We cannot even leave the house without an exceptional reason. What about the Sprint Board and our Definition of Done? What are we going to do? How are we going to be able to pair programs now, how can we continue being Agile like this?

Ok let’s not panic, the definition of “Agile” is being able to move quickly and easily. We just need to adapt, quickly. That ironing board looks like a pretty good desk to me, let’s all install MS Teams. We can embrace Azure DevOps for our work item management. It’s not so bad, is it? No more busy train stations, no more expensive lunches, no more missing kids bath time.

The year is now 2021, we still have no team room, and we still have a pandemic so how is it going? No more face-to-face contact, no more casual chats in the shared kitchen, and no more coffee machines. Summer holidays abroad are not looking likely, but we have managed to overcome a lot of the challenges that were thrown at us. We are versatile, we are agile, and we have adapted. Many companies have closed their offices in the last year, saving bundles of cash on expensive rentals. This suggests that even after we’ve all had our vaccines, quite a lot of us will remain working from home.

At Version 1, our teams embraced the challenges that the Pandemic threw at us. So, what are these challenges? Well, the most obvious challenge is communication. How do we keep everyone on the same page, how can we keep the camaraderie of office life?

Let’s start with the teams…

Getting togetherness from your team calls
Making time for small talk at the start or end of a call might feel like wasting time but with fully distributed teams, those casual chats are a quick win for building and maintaining togetherness.

Another challenge is getting everyone fully engaged on the daily calls. I’ve found that with everyone discussing updates at once it can easily become a status call where people can switch off easily. Each team is different and there is no magic solution, but there are some tweaks that can help a great deal. We cannot stand around a physical sprint board, but we can all share the view of a digital sprint board with tools like Azure DevOps and Jira.

Walking the board
I’ve found walking the board with the team has been an effective way of keeping people engaged. The conversation focuses on the work items rather than the people which keeps the team interested. In a nutshell, the team reviews everything in progress, seeing what can be completed today and what might be blocked, while also keeping an eye on what has not been started.

Rotate the facilitator
It’s easy to fall into a trap of the same person facilitating every day, but if you try breaking that habit it can increase people’s awareness of the whole team, which in turn can build inclusion and collaboration.

Code Reviews
Even when I was a developer, face-to-face code reviews were the most valuable. The peer-to-peer conversation, the explanation of what the code is doing and why, even a demo of the code working, all brings huge value. And it is easy to do by sharing a screen on a teams call or your chosen communication tool. How often do you spot errors with your own code when explaining it to someone else? Maybe you are perfect, but the out loud explanation always helped me. Don’t let our distributed locations stop the code review conversations.

Testing
An extension to the review conversation of course is a manual test. If someone else is going to be testing your code, don’t just hand it over, have a 1–1 call, walk through it, and show it working on a screen share. We are still on the same team if not the same room, let’s discuss what we are delivering!

Pair programming
Like the face-to-face code review, pair programming has so much value and yes it can be done remotely. If you didn’t already know, the benefits of pair programming include better code, immediate code reviews and knowledge sharing. More than that, it is another opportunity to build and strengthen relationships with teammates. If you are new to pair programming it, look it up,
Visual Studio Live Share

Retrospectives
Probably my favourite face to face meeting was the retrospective. The whole team stood together around a whiteboard, chairs pushed aside, discussing the previous sprint and thinking how we can improve. Getting everyone engaged on a call and everyone speaking is a challenge. There are of course tons of facilitation tricks that you can use and there are some pretty good tools too, you just need to find the right balance for the team on that day. Find a good virtual whiteboard and adapt your favourite face-to-face retro’s. A favourite of mine is Miro, seeing each team member moving their cursor around the board gives the feeling of all being in the same place. Adding in some pictures and different colours certainly makes it less dull.

At a company-wide level
We have many online social clubs to choose from including my own favourites brewing beer and cooking! We’ve done social evenings, online escape rooms and even a cocktail/mocktail making lesson for a Christmas party. I find regular social calls keep the team together. Our use of MS teams has increased greatly, while not everyone wants to show their face on camera, it did not take long to realise that seeing someone’s face as you chat makes it all the more ‘normal’.

About The Author
Simon Wraight is a Senior Scrum Master at Version 1.