Katja is an Agile Coach in an organization that had to organize a distributed/#Remote Big Room Planning session in less than 24 hours! Listen in to learn how they pulled it off.
One of the key learnings from that effort was that a #Remote event will take a longer time (maybe 3-4 days) than a locally organize Big Room planning event. But there are many more insights that Katja shares on this LIVE Q&A
What have been the biggest challenges for you and for the teams that you support?
After some time working #Remote, Katja had a retrospective with other Scrum Masters in the organization to understand what were the biggest challenges they were facing. Based on their experience they came up with several tips for Scrum Masters to be able to keep their teams engaged and collaborating effectively. Here are some of the tips, but listen to the interview to get them all:
- Have some unstructured time on the call together, preferably at the start
- Be personal, show your home, or an object, or your pets on the call during the unstructured time
- You can walk while on some of the meetings, if you are not presenting anything take the meeting while walking outside or around your apartement
- Check-in with the team more often
- Define what are the times when the team can expect each other to be available to collaborate online
- And many more! Listen in to learn what were the other tips Katja shared.
We are failing at ignoring Slack / Teams
One of the hardest problems for newly distributed or #Remote teams is that there’s a lot more written communication going on. For example, the chat apps we might be using will constantly “alert” us for another message that someone posted. Are you sure you need to follow all of those messages? We talk about the “fear of missing out” that comes with the extensive use of text-based chat apps, and how to handle that problem in your newly #Remote team.
How do we keep the pulse on what’s happening with the team? Metrics for #Remote teams
Going #Remote presents some big challenges for Scrum Masters that are used to working with co-located or partly co-located teams. One of the questions we get asked the most is how we keep track of what is going on with the team. Katja shares her perspective on how Scrum Masters can follow the team’s collaboration and mood over time. We talk about keeping critical metrics for distributed teams, and the importance of scheduling a time for informal conversations.
About Katja Zorina
Katja is a creative technologist, agile & lean coach and trainer. She focuses on leading & supporting organisations that want to build great products, while learning and improving continuously.
You can link with Katja Zorina on LinkedIn and connect with Katja Zorina on Twitter.
