Lessons Learned: Successful Distributed Agile Teams

Lessons Learned About Successful Distributed Agile Teams

Before the pandemic, people told us, "Agile approaches don't work for distributed teams!" Then came the pandemic and everyone figured it out—more or less.

However, now many teams work in ways they call "hybrid." Those are the most challenging forms for any distributed team: the satellite team or the cluster team. When those teams assume that they can work as if they were all collocated, the teams tend to lose their agility.

Instead, teams can use the eight principles for successful distributed agile teams and optimize for those principles, instead of location.

The principles are:

• Establish acceptable hours of overlap
• Create transparency at all levels
• Create a culture of continuous improvement with experiments
• Practice pervasive communication at all levels
• Create a project rhythm
• Assume good intention
• Create a culture of resilience
• Default to collaborative work

In this presentation, Johanna and Mark will show you how to use these principles to create practices that work for your distributed agile team.