Doing Agile in different time-zones!

My last post was about doing Agile whilst working from home and those points still apply. Where teams are in different time-zones there are additional challenges – especially finding a convenient time to meet for the Scrum ceremonies – daily stand-up, iteration planning, review and retrospective.

It may be that you’ve got different team members in different time-zones and/or different teams in different time-zones – the key is to work out how to use the time-zone to your advantage. For example if the Dev team are behind the QA team then try to provide sufficient work for the QA team to test that is ready for the Dev team to fix when they come back online.

Blocks can occur more often with geographically dispersed teams so it’s best to accept this and have alternative stories that can be worked on. This means that the WIP for geographically dispersed teams is likely to be higher than for co-located teams. The teams will need “after stand-up” time to discuss issues in more detail, this again is something that needs to be facilitated for with geographically dispersed teams.

If there are overlaps in the working day then try to keep these times as free as possible so they can be used for collaboration, scrum ceremonies such as iteration planning, review and retrospectives should be scheduled around these overlap times. If the teams are so far apart then one team will need to be flexible in terms of early morning or evening meetings – if this is the case then the other teams should acknowledge this out-of-hours working and make allowances for where family life and work life clash (I’m sure that any of us working from home also now understand this more!)