A company wide communication rhythm, by Hugo Messer
Depending on the size of the company, people involved in remote collaboration communicate on at least three levels: strategic (CEO), process (project or process managers), and operational (scrum master and team).
Agile has a set of meetings scheduled on the operational level. The product owner, scrum master, and team members are involved in the sprint planning, demo, and retrospective meetings. The scrum master and team members manage the daily stand-up (involving the product owner when needed). I have learned that this meeting rhythm is absolutely crucial to and beneficial for distributed collaboration. When teams do not use this rhythm - especially the daily stand-up - things quickly slide down a slippery slope.
In most cases, the product owner is local, and the scrum master and team are remote. By following the scrum meeting rhythm, both shores automatically communicate daily. This increased communication creates the possibility to continuously adapt, remove hurdles, and create bonds between all team members.
In my company Bridge Global, We have learned that the role of process manager is crucial. We have an onshore account manager and an offshore process manager. Ideally, the customer also assigns a process manager (this can be the product owner or the manager who is responsible for the success of the collaboration). These three managers attend weekly Skype calls that last about 15 – 20 minutes in which they discuss alignment: Is the team on track? Are they communicating effectively? Are they still following the agreements that were initially made? What is going well, and what could be improved? This information is then stored (e.g., in Google docs or Atlassian Confluence) and shared with the entire team, so each week the collaboration improves a little more. We also give a grade on a scale of 1-10 that answers the question 'how happy are you with last week's collaboration' (back and forth!).
The top level communicates every 4 – 8 weeks. In the initial stages of collaboration, it is recommended that they meet at least once every 4 weeks. They discuss the progress of the strategic objectives of the partnership: Are the KPIs still on track? Are we providing value to one another? Do we have synergy? Do we work well together? What are the plans for future collaboration?
For example, a big Dutch/Swedish telecom company assigns a “change manager.” They always have one change manager from their company (local) and one from the partner’s side (remote). These change managers speak weekly. The product owners report to the change managers so they are always aware of the project dynamics. Every 3 weeks, the operational managers meet to communicate progress and the achievement of operational objectives. Every 6 weeks, a meeting is held at the strategic level. On every level, this results in continuous communication and adaptation and fosters deeper ties that result in a long-lasting partnership that increases in value as time passes.
Get the Key Team Members Together at the Beginning
Initiation of a project is very important for smooth execution later. In the beginning, newly formed teams are in the norming stage and they need some time together to collaborate and understand each other better. In distributed teams, this stage becomes more complicated because of not having people physically available at the same location.
As per communication richness theory shown below, face to face communication is the most effective communication channel. Hence, in distributed teams, we should always figure out ways to increase the face to face communication time.
Therefore to successfully kick-off an agile project, it is good to invite people from different locations and let them communicate face to face for some time. In the beginning, the team should work together on initial modeling, understanding high level user requirements, technical strategy and initial risk assessment.
We should not stop doing face to face communication after the initiation. Time to time people should travel and meet physically and rotate team members between various locations, this might be expensive but leads to a high performing team.
Share the Pain of Time Zone difference
Agile teams practice multiple agile/scrum meetings, for example, daily stand-up, planning, review, retrospective and backlog refinement. We recommend to do joint meetings and share the pain of time zone difference by rotating either getting up early or staying up late.
After staying late for a long time, people start missing the meetings and hence, bad impact on team communication. I have seen many teams in this situation and figured out the pattern that after initial few sprints, team members start hating daily stand-ups or other meetings for which they need to stay late for a long time.
Find out a common language of communication
People can not communicate each other properly if they do not understand each other's language. It is very crucial for the team to find out a common language for the team communication. These days, though English is the most commonly used language all over the world but there are some exceptions, for example, Japan, China etc. In these scenarios, there are few options:
- Learn a new language: encourage the team to learn another language. However, many times people are not open for it and it is also difficult for them to excel in the new language in short amount of time.
- Use translator: the team can use a translator who can speak required languages but a single translator could create more dependency and blocker in effective communication. Additionally, this option is expensive too.
- Use translation tools: there are many good translation tools available in the market which the team can use while doing conversations.
Sometimes, even after finding out the common language of communication, people can not understand the accent of each other. To overcome this challenge, companies give training on listening and understanding accent of people from different countries.