Agile in 24 Inches
/
Wednesday 11 March 2020 New York City Business Agility Conference
Everything changes
Ding! My phone alerted me to a new text.
"Hey Dad, where's that monitor that I brought home from school?"
Like many of us that month, our son had just received notice from his employer that everyone was to leave the office immediately and to work from home until further notice. Suddenly, everything changed.
No more team room. No kanban board on the wall. No more standing up at your daily standup. No simply turning to your teammate and asking for help. No more serendipitous conversations in the hallway. The physical proximity held in such high esteem in the agile world vanished in a moment.
What to do? Without the big visible charts on the wall, the index cards or post-it notes if you were old school; without the whiteboards, markers, blue tape, push pins, magnets and all the other staples of the typical agile team, how could we know what needs doing next? How do we collaborate on those things needing collaboration?
"Oh", you say. "We just pull up <insert name of your favorite Agile Development Lifecycle Management Tool here>. It's got everything we need to know."
Ah, if that were ever true, the sudden switch to remote work was going to be its biggest stress test yet.
My son's first action was to requisition an additional monitor. His laptop screen clearly wasn't going provide enough real estate for the information needed to support his work and interactions with his team and its customers. When we returned home from the conference we were attending in New York, I followed suit and ordered a 24 inch monitor to supplement my laptop. As I write this two and a half years latter, it is still right in front of me, just to the side of my main screen.
What we learned about working with remote team members
Working with remote team members created new challenges and opportunities. While we couldn’t simply look across the room and check in with a teammate like we could when we were in person, we could virtually tap someone on the shoulder even if they were several time zones away in the virtual world.
Physical team rooms create the opportunity to collaborate; they do not ensure collaboration. A physical team room is not a silver bullet. Collaboration doesn't just happen. It takes effort. Interactive video conferencing brought us together in ways that a physical team room could never do. However, like a physical team room, a virtual team space does not guarantee collaborative behavior. It too, requires effort.
Interactive video conferencing is just one tool in our virtual team toolbox. Virtual whiteboards along with their many templates and virtual kanban boards are among the most popular additions to the virtual teams' kit. Now that many teams are moving to a hybrid model where some team members are back in the office and others still remote, these tools are still relevant.
Virtual is still relevant in a hybrid world
The reality is that we've always worked to some degree in this hybrid mode. It's a wonder that we didn't adopt these tools long ago. Prior to the pandemic, remote team members' needs were often an afterthought and not fully appreciated. And, frankly, many of the tools to support remote work were not ready for prime time. COVID-19 was the forcing function for adoption and the resultant improvement of these tools and how we use them.
I've always been a fan of using the team room's physical walls as an information radiator. The team uses the space to display information relevant to their work. Since the space is limited, the team curates the information jealously. The walls are their space and the information there serves the team's needs. Only what is needed earns a spot on the wall. If the team needs to know something, the information either gets around via information currents or finds a place on the information radiator. If information grows stale or obsolete, the team updates or removes it realtime. The limited space encourages the team to create a high signal to noise ratio.
A problem with the virtual world
In the virtual world, there is often a perception of unlimited space. On the computer screen, you can just follow this link or drill down via this menu item. This sense of unlimited space creates a problem. With unlimited space, noise tends to creep in. The need to curate feels less urgent. Eventually, the information radiator no longer serves the team. Instead, there is friction and delay while the team struggles to see what's going on and what's next.
What if the computer screen was limited to only what could be displayed at one time? What if the team's information radiator were limited to 24 inches, the diagonal measurement of a typical second monitor? What would you put there?
Flashback
Years ago, when I coached soccer, I taught my team some basic principles. Among these was the idea that each team member should know:
where the ball is
where the obstacles are
where your "help" is (your "help" is the 2 or so teammates who have positioned themselves to be of immediate assistance to your current situation if you are the one with the ball)
The immediate tactical advantage of this knowledge is to get the right people to the right place at the right time to do the right thing. Along with mastering some basic skills, knowing these things enabled every team member to act in a way to optimize the team's chances of advancing the goal of putting the ball in the opponent’s net.
Since soccer is a dynamic sport, the locations of the ball and the team members constantly shift. What happens if the individual team members can't see the ball or where their teammates are in relation to the ball and each other? What would be their chances of winning?
Back to your current reality
Taking these basic principles back to your virtual or hybrid team, does every team member know:
where the ball is
where the obstacles are
where their help is?
Agile in 24 inches
How could a 24 inch monitor for each team member dedicated exclusively as an information radiator help your remote or hybrid team see these things so that they can position themselves and execute in a way that creates optimal flow in both collaborative and individual work to achieve their shared goal?
Start with a blank screen
Put aside your current <insert name of your favorite Agile Software Development Lifecycle tool>. If we start with a blank screen and you could place anything you wanted on that precious 24 inches, what would you put there? What do you need to see realtime that would make obvious the current state and aid in determining what comes next? Don't settle with a canned report from a canned solution. Like a team room walls, this space is yours. What will you do with it?
