Gary is a project manager who is being asked to use an Agile approach and at the same time work with a team with members dispersed between different countries. He can see how to run meetings like Daily Scrum and Retrospectives with a co-located team. But how can he help his team have effective meetings when they're distributed? It's not just that the team has limited opportunities for face-to-face meetings. There are also language and cultural differences to consider.
There's no magic solution to this. Communication takes more time for distributed teams. But don't despair there are things that you can to oil the wheels to help these meetings be more effective. I've picked up some tips through working with Agile teams in large multi-national corporations and also from my work as a director of Agile Alliance board and chair of Agile2008 conference.
Start with being clear about the purpose of the meeting. Consider the agenda carefully. Can this meeting be a series of smaller more focused meetings with fewer participants? Don't include trivial items that can be dealt with outside the meeting or in a one-to-one call. Share the agenda with the participants ahead of time rather than revealing it moments before the meeting starts.
If participants can do some pre-work before the meeting then make sure they know to do so in the meeting invitation and remind them again on the day of the meeting. For a Scrum team this could be updating work remaining in a burn chart or collecting data for a timeline before a retrospective.
Most distributed meetings will be via teleconference. Sometimes everyone's dialing in from their desk phone. Other times it's a bridge between two meeting rooms. Where you have multiple people around one phone, make sure you have good quality speakers/mics so everyone can be heard. Likewise good quality headsets for people dialing in from their desks.
If sound quality becomes bad seriously consider stopping the meeting rather than soldiering on. If someone is dialing in from a cell phone and there's a lot of background noise then ask them to put mute their phone - make sure they know how to unmute too! You may also experience heavy breathing sounds when people are using headsets. This can be quite distracting for other participants but the person doing this may simply be unaware it's happening as they don't hear their own voice. Remind people to adjust their mics.
An introductions round is a good idea if there are new people joining the meeting. If the group is working as a team then introductions won't be needed - although the iteration demo can be an exception as stakeholders may be present.
Ask participants to say their name before talking and don't forget to do this yourself too. If team members have strong regional accents, consider having someone take live meeting minutes and type up points being made in a shared screen window. This can be especially helpful for team members who are trying to follow a conversation in a second language. Following a meeting in a second language can be quite tiring, make sure there are breaks every hour and allow time for breakout conversations in local languages. You can also work with a co-facilitator who can act as a translator to relay key points and questions.
Although everyone is on the call, they may be multi-tasking and doing email---only half-listening to the disembodied voices at the end of the line. Bear in mind that people respond better to human faces. Experiment with webcams. The picture doesn't need to be excellent quality. If you can't get webcams, even static profile photos can help people relate to the people talking on the other end of the line.
Consider some kind of check in activity where each person says something at the start of the meeting. This simple act can help make it easier for participants to speak again once the discussion is underway. Jim and Michele McCarthy describe a powerful a CheckIn and CheckOut protocol which your team might like to try for their meetings.
Another thing that helps participants stay engaged is asking for input from each person during the meeting. Round-robin style only works if it's clear what the running order is, on a teleconference you may need to ask people by name. Where your meeting is bridging between two locations, take care not to give more air-time to the people who are sitting with you. Instead alternate between both locations.
If you have a large group on the call, bigger than a typical Scrum team of up to ten people, you'll find that asking open questions doesn't work very well. People may all shout out at once or you'll get a big silence. So take care when phrasing your questions. Where everyone has computer access, consider using a shared chat room or window that people can used for posting questions. You can also pause the meeting for smaller breakout discussions.
Finally, I've found it's easy to drift into Groupthink on teleconferences. Encourage critique of proposals under discussion. Test for agreement using a verbal fist-to-five by doing a roll call and asking each meeting participant for their level of support for the proposal under discussion.
I hope these tips help Gary with meetings of his distributed team. If you have additional suggestions then please add them as comments below.
A trick that I have used for daily stand up's with a distributed team is to ask for everyone in the team to have some kind of buddy on the other side. And we had a standup's in both countries.
Everyone explained what he had done and what his buddy had done.
This created a very good bond between the buddies. By switching the buddies from time to time, everyone got to know everyone from the other side. A very good technique if your teams are more or less the same size.
Posted by: YvesHanoulle | 04 August 2009 at 08:14 PM