Much of the world has been in lockdown during the COVID-19 crisis. With our teams sent to work from home for the duration, the notion of working together in a single space has been blown away.
In a 4-part series of articles, I assemble a few of my observations on working with teams during the last few months and share some lessons I have drawn from our recent experience. I discuss the implications of co-location; providing the right tooling for communication; and how team maturity plays a part in the outcome. Finally, I also look to the future to see emerging possibilities for working together.
Working together, but apart
The agile community has long adopted co-location as a best practice for high performing teams. Arguments for the benefits of physical proximity include seamless communication, improved trust building and more nimble feedback loops for product development and refinement processes.
“We may have become familiar with the mechanics of working at a distance, but as lockdown extends, human factors come further into play.”
On the flip-side, a large number of organizations have challenges in forming co-located teams. For many reasons, and certainly the legacy of past cost saving initiatives, cross-functional teams often require an assembly job from assorted silos and multiple locations. Many of us have worked with teams which are in reality semi-autonomous pods of team members distributed across timezones and thousands of miles, all stitched together through phone and video links.
As we begin to slowly emerge from COVID-19 lockdown and ponder the future of working, what can we take from enforced isolation? Has the dysfunction of distributed team members been proven once and for all? Or has the fallacy of the co-location mantra been exposed for all to see?
Actually, our experience of distributed working during the prolonged period of lockdown has provided a rich source of often conflicting perspectives for us to sort through. There is, of course, nuance to all of this. In a tale of the entirely expected, we are seeing positive and negative aspects of remote working. We still have much to ponder. We may have become familiar with the mechanics of working at a distance but as lockdown extends, human factors come further into play.
I have been working with a group of teams since before the CoViD-19 lockdown. It has been insightful to see how these teams have met the challenge of this crisis, identifying roadblocks and innovating on new ways of working to keep optimising their flow of value.
The same and different
The groups I have been working with use Scaled Agile’s SAFe framework. In SAFe, teams are organised into teams of teams structures and synchronise their work delivery into Product Increments. These PI’s are in turn made up of a number of iterations lasting 2 weeks.
Prior to lockdown the teams had been running Product Increments consisting of 5 development iterations and 1 special Innovation and Planning (IP) iteration. The IP iteration is somewhat unique to SAFe and allows teams some slack time as emergency overrun buffer and time for retrospectives and innovation. Traditionally, at the end of the IP iteration, a multi-day, big room planning event takes place to enable the teams to create a shared plan and vision for the next product increment.
Just a couple of weeks after the majority of our teams were sent home for lockdown, we were due to be hosting the next big room planning. It was obvious we would need an alternate approach.
As well as abandoning the big room aspect of planning, the groups chose to extend the timeframe that planning could take place in. We utilised the whole of the IP sprint for team refinement and group dependency management sessions. This gave time for the teams to find their feet in remote refinement. We kept shorter ceremonies for all the teams to gather virtually to review their plans, review risks and host a vote of confidence.
There was also one other innovation for the planning. We shrank the size of the product increment from 5 development iterations down to just 3. In reducing the number of sprints, the teams were able to limit the uncertainty generated in a longer planning window. This limit was also a forcing function for high focus on the size of features and acceptance criteria, something that perhaps we take more liberties over when we have more time to fix any issues.
The resulting predictability associated with our planned deliveries was impressively high. We have now conducted two of these short product increments and the teams are extremely confident in delivery. We are now planning on extending the number of development sprints in the next PI as another step in our experimentation in dealing with the novel situation we have found ourselves in.
Next Time
In part 2 of the Working Together and Apart in a Time of Crisis series I take a look at how COVID-19 has transformed our understanding of co-location.
About the Author
Richard Williams is a fan of business adaptivity in all its many forms. He is a Visiting Fellow in the Industry Faculty at Kingston University Business School and an IC Agile authorised instructor in Leadership, People Development and Adaptive Organization Design. Richard has 25 years of experience working in delivery and product roles for a variety of FinTech and Financial Services companies. He is a transformation coach and SAFe Program Consultant.