Covid-19 Distances brought us Closer - A Case Study

Covid-19 is an unforgettable situation in our lifetime on each front personal or professional. It brought disaster to the world (in Socio-politico-economic conditions as well as to the life of individual). Most of the unexpected things are happening around the world.

At our team level also, when distributed work culture adopted due to Covid-19, number of problems were encountered. On one single day, distribution adopted and without analyzing future challenges we followed the government guidelines. But it was not easy as many problems, in our workflow, were about to visible due to this. Although, few of these problems were existing in the teams already but distribution brought these up on the surface bluntly.

But, is this not that one situation which Agile is trying to focus from the beginning, that is: -

• Uncertainty
• Unplanned
• Exponential challenges
• No defined solution to the problem

Let me share what happened with my teams & how we, my team and I (as their Agile Enabler), came out of it.

The first week of distributed workforce was like sailing boat in hurricane and the onus was on myself to help my team to sail this boat through hurricane and reach on the shore. And the journey began as follows:

First Step: Early Retrospective

I (as an Scrum Master of the Team) facilitated a very early Retrospective (after 4 days of distribution starts) with very specific & only one agenda i.e. “Challenges due to distribution and how to address these challenges”

              This Retrospective proved to be boon for us. What we found, were the core challenges of working separately. To be more specific, our main problems were related to: -   

1. Problems of lacking self-organization in the teams (few members faced enormous challenge in organizing themselves)
2. The communication became lesser user-friendly as it was not face-to-face (or co-located) by any means
3. Digital intervention & particular time-box required to begin any communication
4. Home environment is not supporting (disturbance, no dedicated space) to deliver what is expected
5. Technical challenges, VPN issues, Device availability etc.
6. Few members (correctly) pointed that we are working from home does not mean we cannot have personal time. It is expected that we should start early and end late in night because we are at home.

In the same Retrospective, we started discussion to find solution of these challenges. (It was well understood that before leaving the table on that day, all of us should reach to some(expected) solutions of these problems because we can’t go anywhere until we resolve these). After some brainstorming, discussions, arguments, we decided to adopt certain practices.

Second Step: Possible Solutions/Changes introduced by Team

1. Increased frequency of daily scrum to Twice/day – Team decided to have 2 times daily scrum during the day, one when starting first half and second when starting second half (i.e. like 10 – 10:15 AM and 2:30 – 2:45 PM). The whole idea was improved coordination among the distributed members and highlight the blockers ASAP. Now, members were to share the plan only for 4 hours in each daily-scrum session. It helped the complete team in increasing coordination, but it drastically helped them who were facing problem in self organization. They were feeling comfortable as it was easier to plan for lesser time-box now. It really worked for us. I am still following the same with 3 out of 4 teams in my organization.  
2. Common chat group to facilitate discussions – We created a common chat group and all of us were committed to have any work-related discussion on that group only. Until & unless it is very-very specific between 2 people, the communication shall be done on common chat group. It will maintain the sync and information leakage can be cured.
3. If possible, priority will be for video calls – We made an agreement, irrespective of magnitude of discussion, if possible, we shall have video calls. Undoubtedly, on video calls, the engagement was less interrupted
4. Weekly Retrospective – Another important decision taken to have weekly Retrospective with very specific agenda “Challenges in working distributed & solutions”. It is quite different from Sprint Retrospective which focuses on Sprint-happenings. It actually made us better.

Finally: When we got distributed, my whole idea was to strong the scrum values among the team. These values (Commitment, Courage, Focus, Respect & Openness) gave us confidence & courage to be more aligned & have better coordination. And, it happened because we understood the value of communication & alignment. What can be better example than: “One member actually managed to get pass from govt. administration, to visit the remote locality, just to get one device & make it available to another team member so that we can deliver the feature timely”.

Approach for Future:  Now we are prone to have such pandemics in future also and we should be prepared further. In my opinion, the very first step is to understand what the problem is at core & so we need to talk. The approach will be the same, find out core problems & let’s brainstorm to solve these, like we did this time (Retrospective & more coordination). 

I understand that this Covid-19 is unforeseen challenge & might be, we’ll never be out of it. But I cannot deny, it gave, everyone in general, and I & my team specifically, a new way of thinking, new kind of team-spirit, next level of maturity and great confidence to handle such challenges.

One thing still needs improvement that is related to our geographic culture. In our geography, most of us are not supporter of working remotely ( like Work-from-home) and that is why most of us don’t have certain arrangements like dedicated space, working hour ethics at their end (home or anywhere else) which sometime create unnecessary delays & disturbance. I believe, everyone at her/his level making effort to improve such scenarios and is this not the essence of Agile - “To Inspect the current scenario, Adapt the better way and Learn from it for future”?