Agile and Remote Working are really good friends

It's me, Marios

blah blah

Everyone love's Remote Working

So why it is so difficult to make it work?

Remote Management is the reason why

Remote Working is difficult but Remote Management is hell more challenging

Let's jump straight ahead and examine closely an example from the life of a remote engineer

You are a member of an engineers team which is managed by a senior engineer

Every now and then you have a call with the senior engineer where you get some specifications about a new assignment

So you get a new one and you should start working on it asap

You provide an estimation of 2 days for this task and you arrange a follow-up call in 2 days from now

The days pass and your manager cancels the call and pushes it for the day after

Since you are done with the assignment and you haven't received any other, you start doing some refactoring here and there

The next day your manager is available so you have the call as scheduled

So you start presenting all this work you have done and your manager disrupts you a little disappointed

Oh gosh, you are still working on this thing? No-one told you about the demo we are having next week?

You look amazed and disappointed but you want to seem helpful so you ask what I can do to help?

The demo is a success so you have another call right after where you receive a new assignment

Days go by so you have another meeting where some other engineers participate

You start talking about the solution you provided and another engineer says that this won't work

You look amazed but they explain to you that you missed some key details about the technologies you should use

Your manager asks you to stay a little longer in the call where he tells you that this was a big failure

Actually he tells you that it was your job to go and ask a bunch of stuff and details to them and that you always need to try to reach them

He gives you another assignment and you provide an estimation in days as usual

Days go by but it seems you need much more time to deliver this

During the call with your manager, you confess that you realized recently that you need much more time to deliver this

He gets furious and asks you why you are telling this that late

Unfortunately, you start feeling quite disillusioned and unmotivated

Even worse, you feel alone. You don't actually feel a member of any team

Let's face it. Management was awful

Let's take it from the start and bring Agile into the game. You are now a member of a scrum team

You discuss about the stories the whole team is going to work in the next sprint during the planning meeting

You know exactly what are the priorities, what is going to be delivered and when by the whole team

This means you all have common goals as a team and no one is missing key details about the whys, whats, whens and hows

You have daily calls where you discuss with the rest team about the status of your work and potential issues you may have

That way the whole team can spot early enough potential problems and tackle them or even reschedule accordingly

On the other hand, when you are done with your work, this is also visible so you might deal with an urgency instead of doing random stuff

You are constantly in touch with rest team members so you know exactly how your work is going to fit with theirs

This means that the risk to fail and not deliver is minimized by far

The whole team can adapt to plan changes and new priorities because of the incremental way you all are working as a team

You are participating in refinement meetings so you know exactly what will be the upcoming requirements you are going to work on

That way you don't feel like getting random assignments in your plate every now and then

Most important is that you actually feel a valuable member of a team that is building something really important and functional

This motivates you a lot so your productivity is improving constantly

What did change between those 2 scenarios?

Management

It was hell better

Agile patterns help us to reduce the communication gap we have with remote engineers

Agile patterns also help remote engineers to feel equal and important members of a team

Agile patterns help a firm to get the most out of remote engineers

Managerial overhead is reduced by far since we don't actually need to treat remote engineers differently

Remote engineers are equal members of the team and not teammates with special needs

Questions