Toward Successful Distributed Agile Teams

Schedule routine face-to-face communication

Most problems with multi-site development are not technical; they’re interpersonal communication problems. Geographic distance, time-zone offsets, language differences, national culture differences, site-culture differences, and site-status differences make communication less reliable and more difficult.

Periodic in-person communication is important. As one senior leader of a global company said to me, “The half-life of trust is 6 weeks.” When you see mistakes begin to increase, it’s time to put people on airplanes, have them play games together, eat together, and develop human connections.

Aim to have a percentage of staff members traveling from site to site approximately every 6 weeks, with a goal of 100% of team members visiting other sites over a period of years.

Increase logistical support for distributed teams

If you want to be successful with distributed teams, you need to invest money, effort, and time to support that style of work.

• Scheduled communications. Establish mandatory meetings that everyone must attend. Rotate the inconvenient times across sites so that no single site incurs all the time-zone fatigue. Provide effective tools for remote meetings and the network bandwidth to support the tools. Insist on good meeting practices: create agendas, define deliverables, stay on topic, end on time, and so on.

• Ad hoc communications. Support cross-site communications that arise spontaneously. Provide each staff member with communication technology: high-quality microphone, web cam, and adequate network bandwidth. Provide tools for text-based, time-sensitive, streamed communication as well as online forums (Slack, Microsoft Teams, and so on).

• Remote proxies. Designate people ...