Agile Development Blog

I’m traveling this week to Rally’s Agile Success Tour in San Diego.  I love attending these events because they’re a lot of fun and participants seem to get a lot of value – getting out of the office for a half day is a great way to learn and think about how you can get started or get better with Agile.  Plus, the Rancho Bernardo Inn is pretty nice place to spend a day.

The site of Rally's Agile Success Tour - the Rancho Bernardo Inn

But my day job is as a Product Owner, so I’m still trying to keep up with my team while on the road.  And this trip has been a good reminder of the challenges of working remotely.  Here are seven things I’ve remembered that make a big difference if your team has remote members:

1. Actually log in to your chat client. 
Instant messaging is a great way to quickly make contact with people on your team, but if everyone isn’t actually logged in to chat, you often can’t reach the best person.  If I want to talk to Fred, but I can’t reach him, I’ve got to make a decision – do I wait, or do I interrupt Jason, a developer on his team?

2. Dial in the bridge. 
If you’re having a meeting, and you have remote team members, make connecting to the conference bridge a habit, even if you don’t think anyone remote is going to be attending.  Plans change; something comes up such that someone who was going to be in the office is out.  If you don’t connect the conference bridge, remote employees will either give up, or frantically try to catch local participants on IM in the hopes that someone brought a laptop to the meeting.

3. Check in and out on the phone. 
Assign someone in your meeting to remember the remote team members during the discussion.   And make sure you check in with the people on the phone before you hang up at the end of the call.  (Give them a few seconds to unmute before you assume they’re gone!)

4. List your cell numbers.
At Rally, we have a Google spreadsheet that lists office and cell numbers for everyone.  I’m rarely at my desk during the workday, so cell is the only reliable way to reach me.

5. Skype your standups.  
In our team room, a couple of the machines have Skype running.  When you’re remote, video goes a long way to improving connection with the team.  Showing some video of the absurd furnishings or the view outside the hotel room makes it fun.  This morning, I had some bandwidth issues and could only use voice – it didn’t work nearly as well.  Also, with a team like mine, a remote employee who doesn’t enable video for an early morning Skype session will invariably be subject to baseless accusations of not wearing pants.

6. Leave Skype running for a few minutes after the standup is over. 
Often interesting conversations pop up in the 30 minutes following this meeting.  As a PO, I often overhear useful bits of information at this time, and it makes it easy for people to ask me questions they might have forgotten during the standup.

7. Update your stories. 
This morning, when I logged into Rally, it looked like a ton of work was in progress.  Turns out, my team just hadn’t updated their tasks and stories.  Often Rally is the window your remote team members have into what’s going on.  If you don’t update stories, you can end up with unnecessary confusion.  Fortunately, we cleared it up in our daily standup meeting.

These were the things I remembered this week.  So what tips do you have for making life easier on remote team members?