I often get asked questions about Scrum from contacts via email. To help as many people as possible in future I will be sharing the questions I am posed and the answers I provide.
I hope you will find them useful.
This question is a common one around how to succeed with a distributed team. Here we go:
We are struggling to manage a distributed team in different geographical locations. How can you keep a Scrum Team connected and help them to achieve the Sprint Goal?
The only thing that always works to solve this is not to do it in the first place. Collocate your team. It typically lowers the total cost and results in better products being produced.
Many organisations refuse to do this for (lots of) reasons. The next best thing is to take the problem to the Scrum Team it effects and ask them for suggestions to solve it. They will generally come up with the the best possible answers as they will be acutely aware of the specific issues that are being encountered. They are living with the challenges every day.
The sort of actions that often result are from these discussions are:
- The introduction of tools to aid collaboration, sharing and communication.
- Increased levels of travel – High performing distributed teams travel to lessen the impact of the distance at key times. This is the only way I have ever seen distributed teams even come close to being as successful as collocated ones.
Try some changes suggested by the team and then inspect & adapt towards finding the best possible way of working for their unique circumstances.
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Hi,
The other side of having Distributed Team is beneficial to organisation and reaching milestones in terms of Holiday lay over covered by one or other location team members and your work continues to go on for reaching sprint goal ,as along as Product is segmented to global market ,there is no harm in having multi located teams and geographies, as its good way to get the multicultural feedback to the product which aids in business growth .
Thanks,
Rajesh P