Student Q&A – How do you cope with the PO being multiple time zones away from the team? w/ Derek Huether

This week Dave received a request for advice from a student in one of LeadingAgile’s Certified Scrum Product Owner classes:

How to effectively work with a distributed scrum team (both time and distance). We have an IT Software project in which PO is in the US, Development is in Ukraine and Testing is in Vietnam.

ShowNotes

A summary of the suggestions Dave and Derek offer during the podcast:

• Reorganize the team
• Have additional POs or BAs in each location
• Set up a US based team of rockstar POs who organize themselves specifically to support this distributed effort
• Spend more time in backlog refinement and try to eliminate risk by taking as much time as possible to make sure the PBI’s area is clearly defined enough for the teams to work on them (largely) without needing additional questions answered
• Bring the entire team together for a time to establish patterns of communication and personal relationship, with the idea being that they are together for a time to shorten the feedback loop while they practice working together so that they can manage it better when they all go back home.
• Team offsites to build the connection and create empathy between the disparate parts of the team
• Online interaction – like the recent TDD Mobbing exercise Dave participated in on Twitch for Agile Uprising

Contacting Derek

You can reach Derek on the LeadingAgile site at

https://liminalarc.co/guides/derek-huether/
Email: derek@leadingagile.com
On Twitter at https://twitter.com/derekhuether
Or on his personal site at: http://www.derekhuether.com

Contacting Dave

You can reach Dave on the LeadingAgile site at

https://liminalarc.co/guides/dave-prior/
On Twitter at http://twitter.com/mrsungo
Or on his personal site at: http://drunkenpm.net

Feedback/Questions

If you have comments on the podcast, or have questions for the LeadingAgile coaches that you’d like to have addressed in a future episode of LeadingAgile’s SoundNotes, you can reach Dave at dave.prior@leadingagile.com