Developing Dispersed Teams

There appear to me to be three key facts driving the changing reality of my life as an Agile Coach.

1.      High levels of communication and collaboration between committed team members is crucial for an efficient and effective agile engineering team,

2.      Communication, collaboration, and commitment are obviously best developed and supported by team co-location,

3.      Co-location is a ‘busted flush’; the Covid19 crisis is accelerating the existing process of team dispersal that has been driven for several years by the economics of remote working.

“Poor communication”, “poor collaboration”, “poor commitment” are repeated phrases that I hear from, and about, the agile teams I support as we all struggle to master the world of virtual teams and programmes. As “Agile Coach” it is my responsibility to support these teams in their efforts to become the best they can be, but how do I fulfil my role and support these teams when we do not work face-to-face? My ‘coach’ tool-box feels empty; I cannot rely on providing table-football, beer fridges and bean-bags to build a sense of community; I cannot rely on moments of serendipitous coaching where a question or challenge at just the right moment drives a breakthrough in understanding; I cannot rely on shared, structured ‘ceremonies’ to build teams and shared behaviours; I cannot rely on “apprenticing” less experienced engineers at the side of the more experienced. 

It is becoming apparent to me that in helping atomised teams, it is not enough to “coach”. To help my colleagues I believe that increasingly I must “develop”; to identify and help them master the new skills and behaviours they will need. The reality of “geographically dispersed” teams will drive the need to improve skills in written communication, both short-form and long; too often miscommunication and misunderstanding and generated by poor writing. There will also be a need to develop the skills associated with real-time communication such as video calls; too many video meetings have silent members making too little contribution as well as members making too much. The mechanics of team working, be that generic approaches such as Scrum or Kan-ban or team-specific frameworks, will need to be codified and taught as it will not be possible to rely on “osmotic” transfer between team members. Certain behaviours will also need to be explicitly improved; as well as team-working and collaboration, leadership (both team and technical), scheduling and risk and issue management are also becoming dispersed and team members will have to master them. As well as developing these skills and behaviours, there will need to be mechanisms in place to recognise and reward team members performance in them. I believe that “Coach” may prove to be a less useful description of my role in the future. 

If you want to know more about developing the skills and behaviours required for distributed team working, please contact me, jnew@jnew.uk.