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Eelco Rustenburg – Free the organization: The Secret sauce for distributed teams [#reboot10 notes]

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Eelco Rustenburg – Free the organization: The Secret sauce for distributed teams [#reboot10 notes] [abstract]

 

Most projects fail and have features that are never or rarely used.

 

What makes a project successful?

 

It’s people. The team makes a real difference in the project success. If you have a team of commited people that know what they do and love doing it, you’re most like have a great project.

 

What about planning and budgeting?

 

If something is hard, you should do it often. The idea is to plan a little, inspect and adapt, and then plane some more. This will make sure you start seeing a trend and you can then work around this.

The team is responsible, not the project manager. Frees the team from lying upfront, wasting time on estimating, doing just enough to justify starting for a couple of months.

What’s happening is that as you are half-way through you see completely new cool things that you couldn’t imagine before. This makes the whole added value of project bigger, but it also means that the project plan is most likely very wrong at that time.

 

Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

 

We follow these principles:

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer

through early and continuous delivery

of valuable software.

[Full manifesto] 

 

Offshoring is a big risk. Risks are:

 

  • quality decreasing
  • control lost
  • knowledge disappearing
  • communication lags and problems.

 

Opportunities:

 

  • Talent
  • Scale
  • Money

 

Distributed agile @ work

 

The challenge, 20 man years, abut 100k lines of code and took more then a year. It was also distributed.

 

The approach:

Bring the team from India for 6 weeks on site into Europe – Holland. Daily sychnorized meetings for 5 meetings, if we need to improve something we can do that.

 

But what went wrong?

 

 

  1. Expectations
  2. Culture
  3. Language
  4. Context
  5. Quality

 

If you look at India, if they are building a road they are doing this rapidly, because they are in this high road economy. So when they build things, they don’t care about things around the road. But in Holland, they developed stuff for some much longer that they can obsess over more details.

Quality issue was not that they wanted to do less quality, but that definition was different. Moving teams around helped with that.

 

Timetables, they didn’t know this concepts, so the culture was a problem until they learned.

 

India compared to Netherlands

 

Growing is cool  vs. Small companies are cool

Quality is high when it works flawlessly vs. Quality is high when there are no flaws

Yes means: “I understand what you say” vs. Yes means: “I agree with what you say”

Shaking head means “I am thinking” vs. Shaking head means: “I disagree”

Growing economy makes money a big driver vs. Satisfied economy makes fun/fulfillment bigger driver

 

How to deal with this

 

Focus on agile principles

The team knows … challenge them

Communication and interaction above all

Just enough process

 

There are no remote teams. There is just one team.

 

Scrum overview

 

Product backlog -> sprint backlog is determined by the team and priorities -> 2-4 week iterations, every day we’ll sync with the team -> Potentially shippable product increment

 

Specifically in this case

 

  1. Shared goal – shared code base, shared product backlog
  2. One language
  3. Planning meetings together with video skype calls
  4. Flying people around
  5. Talk about remote team member
  6. Daily standups with video
  7. Retrospectives
  8. Management by trust and letting go
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