Streamline communication accross the pond

That’s it! I’m going to rename this blog ;-). It’s all about communication again.

Since I started to work as an Offshore Manager almost 3 years ago I became sort of a “communications hub”. Team members in Ukraine got used to communicating to other development managers and team members in US through me. While it made sense in few occasions we didn’t do much about it, especially because I was a development manager for majority of the features developed offshore. Bad habits are hard to break, so this went on for quite some time, until we moved to Agile. With me coaching all the Agile teams that came on board I still could be the communications hub, but I decided to seize the opportunity and change this behavior across the teams. Now I encourage all team members to communicate directly to their Scrum Masters, Product Owners and peer team members using any communication channels available. With Skype, cameras and headsets the bar is so low, that talking to someone across the pond is almost easier than walking to another room on the same floor.

In my capacity as an Offshore Manager I still help identifying inefficiencies across teams and manage core as well as “out-of-band” projects, but now my team members in Ukraine are more self-sufficient and don’t depend on me for communication with their peers in US. This allows for more time focusing on scaling Agile and coaching multiple Agile teams.
While this transformation is not easy as it requires certain comfort level from both sides of the ocean I see how Agile being a catalyst by fostering this behavior. There is just no other way to communicate if we want to succeed with Agile, so everyone is vested in making it work.

When Offshore meets Agile

This post belongs in both of my blogs “Leading Agile Transformation” and “Succeeding with Offshore Management”, so I’ll publish it in both…

When companies look at Agile the question of location often comes up: people are afraid to implement Agile with offshore teams due to the distributed nature of the teams. Of course it’s great when you have face-to-face communication, but I see no problem with implementation of Agile in distributed environment (ok, maybe some challenges).

There was a research done on the subject of communication in different office settings, and what they found is that best communication happens when people are sitting in the same area or in adjacent cubicles. Next best setup is an offshore model and the worst setup is when people are located in the same building but not in adjacent areas. The difference in communication efficiency was significant between 2^nd and 3^rd categories, but insignificant between 1^st and 2^nd. One of the reasons for these findings could be that people in the 3rd category think they are collocated and do not need to invest in improving communication channels and communication efficiency. On the other hand, folks in distributed setting are well aware of the challenges of communication and are investing a lot of effort in constant improvements.

Agile fosters frequent communication and helps distributed teams to advance to the next level of efficiency. Yes, there are challenges that are exacerbated with Agile: more communication requires more discipline and sometimes changing the ways we communicate and may require additional tools to support it. This is not different from any other problem that Agile helps to put a spot light on and that requires resolution. Agile will emphasize what we as an organization need to focus on to make sure required communication levels are met.

One thing we’ve been struggling with before was choosing the right timing for onsite visits: the environment was pretty chaotic and it was difficult to plan for a visit and to tie it to a certain event (planning/design review, etc). With clarity of SCRUM it’s obvious how we can leverage the framework to plan for visits: Release/Iteration planning and Demo sessions are a natural fit for this.

As part of our Agile transformation I’m making sure to have not only Agile enthusiasts on  the other side of the ocean, but someone in coaching capacity to augment my efforts on site and help teams when I’m not available due to time difference or any other reason.