Hello.
I'm Mark.
I coach software teams on how to use things like Lean, Agile, TDD/BDD, Extreme Programming,
and good old fashion hard work to create high quality code and get it into production where
it can start earning a return on investment.
Agile says that the best way to communicate to and within an Agile team is face-to-face.
This is the driving force behind the trend toward putting teams in a big room so everyone
can work together.
If you've ever experienced the energy of working in a team room with a highly productive team,
you understand why organizations work so hard to create that type of environment.
But as great as it is to be colocated with a bunch of brilliant team mates, sometimes
the people you need to work with aren't all going to just happen to be in the exact same
place on the planet.
So do we just skip the whole face-to-face thing when dealing with remote work?
No?
Well then how do we follow the Agile principles when people aren't co-located?
That is what this video is about.
Have you ever been in a meeting where you had a few people around a table and a few
people on a conference call?
Everyone in the room can see each other, but they can't see or be seen by the people on
the phone.
What happens when someone on the phone starts talking and people aren't interested?
Their phones come out, they start browsing the news on the computer, start counting ceiling
tiles, fidgeting, having side conversations, etc.
The person on the phone may have no idea that they've lost everyone and assumes everyone
listening with rapt attention.
I've even seen people get up and leave the room; the person on the phone has no clue
that the main person they thought they were talking to is gone.
Or even worse, the person on the phone starts talking about an issue they are having with
a co-worker only to discover that the person they are talking about is right there in the
room listening.
A great deal of our ability to communication and interact with people is based on what
we can see visually.
If someone is working without the visual channel, the quality of communication back and forth
with them is going to be severely hampered.
Video conferencing capabilities are inexpensive and readily available, but just because the
capabilities exist doesn't mean teams use them effectively.
The way many organizations try to use video conferencing is to schedule it for meetings.
Basically they are replacing the phone bridge with a video bridge.
This can be useful.
If you are working from home and join a meeting it is infinitely better to be able to see
the people you are talking to.
If you are losing their attention, you can tell.
If the person you are talking to gets up and leaves the room, you aren't oblivious.
If you want to talk about Bob's body odor, you may temper what you say because he is
sitting right there looking at you across the video conference.
But face-to-face communication goes way beyond simply having meetings on video.
A large percentage of the information flowing back and forth between team members happens
outside of scheduled meetings.
This is particularly true with Agile teams because they should be working hard to minimize
meetings.
That is why the organization invested in the team room in the first place.
Simply doing a 15 minute daily face-to-face meeting on video isn't going to replicate
being in the office.
The Agile teams I've worked with that have the most effective communication with remote
team members have always-on persistent video.
Their virtual team room is just that.
The virtual room where everyone joins and works on video where they can see and be seen.
If there are physical team rooms with multiple people working in them, those rooms get connect
to the virtual room with video units that offer good audio and video coverage of the
room.
They connect first thing in the morning and stay up all day.
The value of this type of setup isn't immediately apparent--especially if you see software development
as a bunch of solo activities performed by individuals that just happen to be grouped
together in a team.
However, if you see software development as a collaborative effort, working this way quickly
shows its value.
If Bob comments to Sue that he is having problems getting to the development server, Chris can
overhear and mention that it is being rebooted and he should try again in a few minutes.
This is what would happen if everyone were physically in the office, but with an always
on virtual team room it can happen regardless of who is located where.
This type of communication is exactly why teams started trying to work together in team
rooms in the first place and there is no reason remote people shouldn't be able participate
the same as if they were there in person.
I hear some people say that with instant messaging they don't need persistent video because they
can just text each other.
I'm all for giving teams good instant messaging tools--it gives you an option for asynchronous
communication.
If Alice sees on the video that Bob looks like he is really heads down with a problem,
on a call, or having a conversation, she may send an instant message for him to respond
to when he isn't busy.
Even when talking in the same room, teams are constantly using instant messaging to
share urls, ip addresses, code snippets, funny pictures of cows, etc.
But as powerful as instant messaging is, the Agile principles say that it should always
be supplemental to the best way teams communicate: face-to-face.
If we want to be driven by the Agile principles, we need to leverage our technology to enable
face-to-face interactions even when dealing with distributed teams.