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Subject:RE: Agile working with offsite teams From:"Leonard C. Porrello" <Leonard -dot- Porrello -at- SoleraTec -dot- com> To:"Sarah Blake" <Sarah -dot- Blake -at- microfocus -dot- com>, <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Thu, 4 Sep 2008 07:56:36 -0700
Sounds like a difficult situation, but you might be able to make it
work.
A company I worked for previously used Agile for a $24 million pharmacy
management application project, and we used teleconferencing to
facilitate daily scrums comprising team members in several locations
around the country. Since several team members were remote, we had a
"scribe" (usually me) capture all of the details of the scrums. These
were sent to scrum members daily and went into Lotus Notes for future
reference. The practice of capturing minutes is somewhat contrary to the
spirit of Agile, but doing so helped ensure that everyone (including
primarily visual learners) shared the same understanding--or that, at
least, was the theory. We used NetMeeting when graphics or
demonstrations were required.
I have to add that the project failed and the company is no longer in
business. Trying to use Agile with a team was scattered to the four
corners of the earth contributed no small part to that failure. Agile
was a very poor methodology choice for that project.
It might not be so bad if only you (the writer) are remote and are a
good auditory learner.
Leonard
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+leonard -dot- porrello=soleratec -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+leonard -dot- porrello=soleratec -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- c
om] On Behalf Of Sarah Blake
Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2008 7:09 AM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: Agile working with offsite teams
Hi all,
I've recently begun a new job, at which I've been given the
responsibility of handling the documentation for a set of products that
are developed by a team overseas.
Now, this isn't a situation that's entirely new to me - in the past I've
worked on a number of projects that have required international
communication - but this has a far larger scope than what I've done
before, and will require a more intensive level of communication (the
overseas team are also hoping to migrate to SCRUM over the coming
months).
So given that I'm essentially going to have to put a communication
strategy in place from scratch, and given that the dev team have no
experience in working with an overseas writer, and given that my
knowledge of SCRUM is so far entirely theoretical, I'm hoping to be able
to use the experience of this list as a guide; can anyone offer any
suggestions, warnings, or similar experiences from which I might learn?
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