Remote teams and Scrum

What is a Scrum team?

A Scrum team is a group of people using the Scrum framework to perform their work. In the next sections, we’ll describe in detail the Scrum methodologies.

Let’s see in brief the roles of people in a Scrum team:

• The Development Team handles the implementation of the actual work to be delivered within the sprint.
• The Product Owner is responsible for splitting and prioritizing the work in small increments. This way the Development Team can release fast, what values more.
• The Scrum Master is ensuring that the Scrum team has all the tools and space needed to perform their work. Validates that Scrum principles are followed and safeguarded. Usually, the Scrum Master is a member of the Scrum team.

As a Scrum team, it is important to define the stakeholders you are producing value for! Scrum started as a method for developers and products, so stakeholders were the actual users using the product. Nowadays, the Scrum methodology is used by more teams, so stakeholders can vary and even be people from within the same organization.

What is a Remote team?

A remote team’s core characteristics are:

• Team members are located in different places, e.g., working from home, different office spaces, or even different countries.
• Team members with different working hours, different time zones, or different schedules.

The remote team still collaborates toward common goals. Team members need to coordinate and work together to achieve these goals. But, being remote has a few challenges of its own. And the team must enhance their ways with habits that improve their work:

• Members work independently. Each member has an autonomous task to work on.
• Asynchronous communication. When a member is sending a message to the team, the default is to wait for some time for a response. The response will not be instant – synchronous. And that should be ok.
• Good planning is required. The team will need frequent sync-ups to align and collaborate on the delivery of work.

A remote team is relying more on tools that assist in working from a distance. Tools that help with async communication, collaboration, and sharing of information.

Having the right tools in place helps a remote team build habits and excel in their craft.

Challenges

Working in a remote team imposes a new set of challenges to overcome:

• Establishing a dedicated workspace at home is one of the biggest challenges when working remotely. The ideal setup is a separate room or desk that defines a “work setting”.
• Colleague availability defaults to “not here right now”. It is best to avoid assumptions on availability, and plan ahead for any connection and questions with colleagues. Set a meeting time, or share your input with a loose timeframe for an answer – instead of “right now”.
• Updates and syncing with the team default to interactions with no physical presence. This means that the team either follows the “not here right now” rule or sets meetings to get in sync.
• Reporting on progress requires more effort, as people work alone. The team needs to find the balance and flexibility to control reporting. Tipping the scale towards too many meetings, or too few interactions, results in a lack of focus.
• The proper work/life balance is harder to manage when working from home. With no clear distinction between office and home, people tend to work more or lose focus. In both cases, a personal schedule and discipline can help.
• The switch from an in-office to a remote setting makes people feel lonely. Lack of physical interaction and water-cooler discussions need additional effort to overcome.

Opportunities

The remote setup offers some benefits to teams working that way:

• People are happier when working remotely. The reasons vary from less commuting time to schedule flexibility.
• Less distraction and more focus, since employees control their time and distractions. Focus time can help in delivering better work and being more productive.
• Enabling diverse collaboration is not bound to the office room or cube space. Working online, you collaborate with people from other departments on new ideas, enabling true agility.
• Asynchronous work is an enabler for many initiatives that can work in parallel. In an async workflow, people can collaborate over documents, comments, and code. Meetings and calls are for a few hard decisions and brainstorming. This way, many projects can progress in parallel.
• Remote work is location-agnostic, meaning that people can work from anywhere. This flexibility enables team diversity in hiring. Also, the location flexibility allows employees to work from anywhere. So, a business-vacation blended scheme is possible.