Agile Teams: Innovation and Execution Culture in Remote Working

January 27, 2021 by Vijaylaxmi Bose

From the past few quarters, the entire world is dealing with one of the biggest uncertainty due to COVID times. During this many teams have dealt with volatility and uncertainty, and most of the Lean/Agile teams have adapted to many new ways of working and everyone have “Remote working” as a new normal.

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There are many hiccups and disturbances initially causing some inconvenience for the teams apart from the initial high expectations of seamless operations on BAU work. The anxiety of not knowing what the next few months look like and how the teams connect back in office environment are few to mention that were always in grey conclusions.

Most of the organizations predicted that the Work from home will extend to 2021, while some of the companies declared they have permanently enabled work from home for their employees. All of this indicates how the leadership teams think of facilitating the right kind of environment for teams working in remote conditions.

In short, the Team collaboration, how well we can measure this while connecting virtually?

• What at the essentials measurements we can think of to help the teams stay effective and connected despite the remote collaboration?
• What are the new norms in Team collaboration, Tools and Tech for Teams, Meeting norms, Communicate and Connect and Productivity metrics?

There are many tools that have evolved to aid the teams through Remote Work and help address any course corrections till they gain some maturity.

With all the best practices teams have pondered and adapted, let us go through some recommendations and practices that can help the teams to stay Agile while working remotely.

By taking the short survey, analysing their results, and applying the recommendations for their targeted improvement areas, teams will be able to significantly enhance their remote working experience.

The Fab 4 Quadrants of Remote Working, effectively

First Quadrant focuses on how effectively individuals are able to connect and work remotely by inculcating the current practices using the following competencies:

• Clarity and Focus on the Work

  Keeping the Clarity on the backlog of work and Focusing at work are the two key things in any working norm. Hence ensuring the same focus while working from home can be exceedingly challenging. The blurred line that Working at home brings between business and personal facets of family together under one roof, makes it very vulnerable to get distracted when trying to accomplish the key tasks of your work until you are able to separate business and personal tasks at home. So, it is very key practice to draw a clear line and keep doing a course correction in the times of deviation.

• Time Management

  Of course, irrespective of the remote practices, this is always good to follow effective Time Management. With this, not only your organizing and planning helps you to segregate your time between specific tasks but also sets the right expectations for your colleagues working together. This is especially important when working remotely as there are often many more disturbances and diversions on your time. Good time management practice empowers you to work smarter by getting more work done in less time. This helps especially in pressuring times and Delivery deadlines.

• Task Prioritization

  This cascade all the way up from you to your Managers and stakeholders working you. Once you learn how to prioritize means getting more valuable work done in the limited time you have each day. This way you help your Team’s Delivery and Product Owners in giving the right capacity allocated for the right work items. It’s one of the keystones of productivity and once you know how to properly prioritize, it can help with any aspect of your time management to work-life balance.

• Working Environment

  Nothing beats a clutter free environment. It is very important aspect to set up a workstation that is clean, comfortable, boosts the productivity and limits the distractions.

Second Quadrant focuses on Teamwork and how the team is able to collaborate and work together in a healthy manner while working remotely. Key competencies of this quadrant are the following:

• Working Agreements

  Any Agile Team should begin their journey with Working agreements. During Remote times, they serve as solid guidelines to keep the teams united. Teams are more effective if they set up working agreements for what they expect of each other in any situation/ceremonies. It is advised, Teams should revisit these working agreements and adapt to the remote culture by fine tuning them in the way how they want teams should operate effectively.

• Goals, Short-Term and Stretched

  Setting short-term goals will help the teams by keeping everyone stay focused and working toward the right shippable delivery in every sprint. While this continues to be the critical component for remote teams working effectively, it is important for teams to have their Goals defined with clarity like Short-Term, which can be achieved in shorter time-boxes and Stretched, which are possible only when teams thrive for a bigger business value in lesser time available. Transparency on these will help the teams to utilize their capacity wisely.

• Team Meetings

  Should be short, Lean and Productive. Though Meetings and virtual working sessions are the important elements of remote collaboration, they have to be effective and cautious to make sure time doesn’t get wasted. Many aspects to be considered for remote meetings like time zone differences, Duration, Frequency, Effective facilitation and how to engage the teams in a healthy and productive fashion.

• Team Surveys and Health Monitoring

  Healthy collaboration is possible only when the Team’s happiness and health are monitored and mentored in the right situations. Team dynamics play a big part in Product delivery effectively. Through Agile surveys and assessments, Teams should continue to build relationships, take feedbacks and make decisions to keep them self-organized while working remotely.

Third Quadrant focuses on the Tools and Technology the team access while working remotely. Key competencies include the following:

• Meeting & Video Conf. Tools

  Effectiveness of the Team meeting entirely changes when it is shifted from physical meetings to remote one. Despite that, if teams can have video conference and good infrastructure tools, it boosts the collaboration. During the COVID times, there were thousands of tools developed to keep this aspect of working effectively on team meetings.

• Collaboration Tools

  Be it simple communication or any Training / brainstorming teams needs to have, a power collaboration tool like Slack, MS Teams will make the life easy to keep the teams connected and avoid lot of unnecessary communications. Organizations should continue to leverage the collaboration tools available in the market as a good investment for the productive team culture.

• Project / Work Visibility Tools

  Transparency and Predictability are always two side of a Agile Delivery team. To facilitate these in remote times, Teams can opt for many online tools to makes sure their Features, Stories and Tasks are correctly mapped, Visible on the Roadmaps and easily accessible while doing real-time reporting.

• Infra Support & Access

  Always have the support team on standby to help the teams in supporting the needful access on the right tool / applications and any Test environments. This team should work as an extended arm during remote times.

Final and Fourth Quadrant focuses on the facilitation of team ceremonies, meetings and any collaboration sessions. The needful competencies are as followling:

• Team Engagements

  There are many creative methods that facilitators / leaders can use to engage teams in virtual meetings . This includes developing a structured plan to understand how the teams benefit by best utilization of tools, surveys, activities, polls, sessions discussions, etc., to engage team to make sure they are interactive and make most out of the time as team together.

• Preparation for Facilitators

  The facilitators should invest time in homework by preparing and designing remote meetings ahead of time to make them effective. This includes a structured agenda, purpose, results and any other actions that should be discussed with the team in the meeting.

• Listening & Questioning

  The Quality of the meeting can be enhanced significantly by using the Questions effectively by meeting facilitators. Specific listening and questioning techniques, and body language signs (if possible, video) make them more engaged in the meetings. Active listening skills help in identifying the dysfunctions, guide the team to follow working agreements, meeting norms, and ensure all team members have a fair chance to express their messages.

• Meeting Closure

  This is one of the last key steps. Closing virtual meetings effectively is vital for team members to make sure they feel that the time spend was worth and value gained with the meeting. In addition, the meeting notes serves for any decisions, impediments and action items that members have agreed. So the Minutes of meeting should be sent out on time and also followed up in a timely fashion. Though this is a regular practice even without remote working, it is vital that teams don’t miss these small aspects imbibed into their team norms.

All of the above competencies can help the teams to improve the collaboration and teamwork and there by their productivity. Organizations and their Leaders should keep revisiting the health of their teams to identify impediments while working remotely and keep identifying the new ways of working to support the teams to stay focused and Agile!!