Advice for Geographically Distributed Teams Transitioning to Agile
You have any number of choices for your lifecycle if you are a geographically distributed team transitioning to agile. I do recommend a servant leader agile project manager for coordination and risk management. With people all over the world, it’s difficult to coordinate the project, which leads to more risk.
Scrum is often not the best approach for geographically distributed agile teams. That does not mean the distributed team should not go agile. It just means they should not use Scrum. If the distributed team can all travel to one place so they can get trained together by the same Scrum trainer, and if they can take the opportunity to talk together to discuss what they need from the ScrumMaster, then maybe they can use Scrum, especially if they use their retrospectives well. It’s a lot of responsibility for a team new to agile and new to Scrum. If you’re a team new to agile and to Scrum and you try this, do yourself a favor and use a coach.
When your first start, electronic tools do not always make seeing and managing the risk easier. Tools can prevent transparency until you understand what you are doing. I like starting with sticky notes or cards on a wall or board and waiting to choose a tool until the team members learn how to work together and figure out what they need.
I don’t see how you can choose a tool before you know what tool you need. One tip: Do not allow your management to select a tool for you. You, as a team, should select a tool for yourselves. You might start with digital pictures of your task board on a project wiki before you decide which tool to use.
If you have several teams all working toward one business goal, you have a program, and that is a different problem. These are precisely the problems no one teaches you in project management certification courses. I consider knowledge of different lifecycles essential for project managers.
Project managers who want to control their teams better have a darn good reason—after all, these people are adults. They manage the rest of their lives. Are you trying to tell me they can’t manage their work?
And these are the problems that can cause geographically distributed projects to fail.
