Challenges, meetings, results in case of working from home and Agile environment creation

Working from home is challenging for everybody – from one hand for the Scrum Master, who should guarantee effective meetings, to stimulate team work and the environment for active knowledge sharing. From the other hand, all team members and business stakeholders in general face challenges. We would like to share with you the ones we observe the most and to give some advice how the teams can deal with them.

• Challenge 1 - Effective meetings

One of the most important conditions for an effective meeting is all participants to be active and to express their opinion. This is sometimes an issue even on live meetings. It is even harder on remote ones with participants on the desks behind their workstations.

Some Advice:

    1. Require from participants to to use their camera.

2. Research different tools you can use in this particular environment. Don’t fully rely on microphones or cameras. You can use web based surveys, Q&A, etc. They will ease the communication process.

3. The remotely meetings also require serious preparation in advance that sometimes takes significant amount of time. It is important to make an agenda, to plan the time very carefully and to keep the participants focused during the meeting.

• Challenge 2 – Ensuring and applying transparency in the process (Transparency)

Agile is based on transparency. It is really important for successful Agile implementation. Building transparency in a project is an Agile practice that guarantees access to clearly summarized and simple information which gives quick understanding for project's progress and status.

Advice – for the Agile teams on premise most of the daily tasks information is on the wall accessible to everyone. This is impossible in a remote environment. You should carefully plan and organize your Information Radiators in a remote environment. It is not enough to place some information somewhere, but to be constantly updating, communicating and using it during the meetings.

• Challenge 3 – Knowledge sharing

One of the most important points of the Agile environment is the willingness to share – what they have learned about the product and the technology.

Most of the time when the team is on premise, this knowledge sharing happens by itself – due to the ability directly to ask someone for information or to the opportunity to hear some discussions between the others (osmotic communication).  In case of a remote environment, do not expect this process to happen by itself – explicitly organize meetings with this primary objective. Ask your team to think in advance what is new for them and to share with the others. Refinement sessions are very important, allowing the team to discuss and take decisions on the further product development.