Yesterday I had the honor to participate as a key speaker at an EPAM webinar on the topic of “Efficient teamwork from home”. As the topic is trending and attracted a lot of viewers, let me share some key points, tips and tricks presented.
Started with a brief story of one of the most embarrassing projects I have managed years ago. In short, we were a distributed “team” of 4 (2 Devs, PO and me as PM), working on a Drupal-based learning platform. In just a couple of weeks of chaos and non-working-software-delivery we decided to cancel the project, as the frustration in all the parties went to critical level.
The learning from the experience - we messed up all the vital components of developing a successful product remotely, more embarrassing we failed to do so with only 4-members crew:
- Focus
- Alignment
- Regular syncing
So back in 2020, I worked mainly with a squad of brilliant and motivated teammates on an innovative platform for the Airline industry. The following slide tells our story best
In essence, we are achievers, and happy ones. We owe it mostly to our impeccable face-to-face way of working. And, when in the end of Mar ’20 all of us had to work from home, it’s no surprise we were a little bit worried on the impact of our results.
And… surprisingly it didn't negatively
(backlog items delivered per sprint)
Not only we sustain being efficient and effective, but also keep on improving our delivery... and don't mind S32 results - it was our Christmas sprint with only a skeleton crew left to cover.
And, here are the promised key tips, tricks and advices, provided by all the members in our squad.
I. In general
(communication should be clear, brief and on point)
- Keep a conference room open all the time so the team mates could jump in quickly when needed. We use the daily sync conference room/link for the purpose.
- Put your goal(s) as topic in your team chat channel.
- Use separated team channels for the different topics – to help focusing.
- Remind about the upcoming event(s) on the same day over the daily standup.
- Update tasks and put comments in Jira more often.
- Be available for conversations, anytime. Have the team chat and conference apps installed on your mobile.
- Pair Programming works very well with screen sharing. Just do it :)
- Dedicate time to rest away from the the PC.
- Planning poker: scrumpoker-online.org
- Retrospective board: funretro.io
- Visualizing tools: awwapp.com, ideaboardz.com
- Scrum of Scrums. Keep it short. Only share blockers, dependencies and highlights (in that particular order, in up to a minute).
- Attend other teams’ reviews, all-hands gatherings, and any other sync & alignment events. Keep them brief and on point.
- Isolate yourself in a separate room. Helps with focus.
- Dress for work. Helps with the ready-for-work state.
- Beat the social loafing with team-members keeping each other accountable.
- Exercise regularly – it helps not only your body, but mostly your brain!
- Isolate yourself from your family, to keep distractions at minimum.
- Play online games with your team mates. It boosts team morale to extraordinary level.
- Do mini hackathon events online, to keep everybody engaged.
- ... work from your balcony... and get some beer :)... classic
On the research side, Nick Bloom’s study on the "work from home" topic seems to be invaluable. It shows clearly the main benefits: "13% improvement in performance in the working from home teams and 50% reduction of the quit rates in the company". (Watch the full study and research summary here)
In the end, let us remind ourselves the big winner in the working-from-home situation is the nature, and it means that we all win (somehow) being stuck in a quarantine. Maybe it's a good idea to think about the future: how could we keep on reducing the city pollution, caused by the daily commuting even without viruses, aliens, software bugs and all other life threats.
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