My Scrum Team may be Instructed to Work from Home — How to Prepare?
There’s more to it than remote facilitation of the Scrum events
There’s more to it than remote facilitation of the Scrum events
We live in uncertain times. Corona (COVID-19) has the world in its grasp. Right now, we all focus on doing everything we can to slow the virus from spreading. We all see why this is important.
Governments are contemplating or are already enforcing draconic measures. In several countries schools are being closed, travelling is restricted, sporting events are cancelled, people are forced to work from home. In other countries, these are realistic options.
Limiting the impact on our health is our number one priority. But there’s also the impact on your daily work. If you are ill-prepared, then being forced to work from home for an unknown period can disrupt your company. To limit the impact, you need to take measures in advance, like NOW.
Here’s how a Scrum Team can prepare for working from home for an extended period.
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Ensure that your team members can work from home
First and foremost, you need to make sure that everyone within your team can work remotely. This includes answering the following questions:
Do people have a well functioning internet connection?
Do people have the right material to work from home?
Do people have a workspace at home?
These items and more are discussed in this awesome article from Lisette Sutherland:
Are you ready to work remotely? — Collaboration Superpowers
When it comes to what makes for an ideal remote worker, the consensus is clear: remote working is not for everyone…www.collaborationsuperpowers.com
Ensure that you can create a “Done” Product Increment
A Scrum Team exists to create a potentially releasable “Done” Product Increment. Everything begins and ends with this. This is why you have to address if you can do this while working from home.
Technical limitations could prevent you to create a “Done” increment. But team agreements or company policies could limit you as well. An example of this is a rule to have two people sitting together to push code to production. This will not be possible when you have to work remotely. This means that you will have to find an alternative.
You need to resolve the impediments that will prevent you from creating a “Done” increment. Without a resolution, the team will be heavily impacted as they will not be able to be transparent on what they create. If the limitations can’t be resolved, then the team — and maybe the development organisation as a whole — should reconsider the Definition of “Done”, adjusting it to what CAN be achieved remotely.
You should also take dependencies with processes and people outside of your team into account. The fact that you depend on others outside of your team to create a “Done” Increment (which isn’t ideal for a Scrum Team) should not turn into blockers as soon as you need to work from home.
Ensure that you can uphold artifact transparency
Without transparency, there’s no Scrum. This means that artifact transparency (involving the Product Backlog, the Sprint Backlog and the Increment) should be complete. Therefore you need to assess if artifact transparency can be complete when working remotely, both for the Scrum Team and for your stakeholders.
“Scrum relies on transparency “ — Scrum Guide 2017
For more on transparency, here’s an awesome article from Sjoerd Nijland:
Empiricism: Transparency
Road to PSM III — Episode 2medium.com
Ensure that you can collaborate from home
Working from home is one thing. Collaborating with your colleagues and other stakeholders is another. Here’s an article from Paddy Corry that deep-dives into the topic, helping you to prepare for the situation:
7 Concrete Ways to Improve Collaboration in Remote or Distributed Scrum Teams
Co-location was once a pre-requisite for success with agile approaches like Scrum. This is no longer the case: Remote…medium.com
From the 7 concrete ways to improve collaboration, I like to emphasise working agreements. If you are used to working co-located, then working from home adds a new dimension to collaboration. You need to ensure that you have solid alternatives for ad-hoc 1-on-1s and other informal communication as this is a cornerstone of great teamwork.
You can’t continue building your valuable products without your stakeholders. What happens when stakeholders need to work from home too? Collaboration with those stakeholders also needs to remain intact. You can do this by listing the stakeholders that you need to collaborate with and then going through the list to ensure collaboration can continue.
Conducting the Scrum events from home
If you can address all the previous topics, then you will probably have no issues to do the Scrum events remotely. It probably is the least of your concerns. When you search the internet, you will find limitless resources to help you conduct a Sprint Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review and Sprint Retrospective remotely. Plus I’m betting that you have experience with it yourself.
As a Scrum Master, how can I help?
A Scrum Master should help the Scrum Team to prepare for the new reality. She/he can do this by proactively facilitating the discussion on how working from home, being distributed, will impact the Scrum Team. Scrum Masters should help the team to resolve the impediments to work effectively. This includes addressing the potential impact on artifact transparency, an often forgotten Scrum Master responsibility.
When working remotely, a Scrum Master will need to help the Scrum Team to find ways to be as effective as possible. She/he will need to help the Scrum Teams to deal with the situation constantly.
So, take the lessons from this article at heart and start preparing!