Introduction
Managing distributed teams is all about finding the balance between soft and hard influencers.
On the soft side, teams need to form a certain team spirit or team culture. Why are they a team? What’s important to them (values)? What are they working on? The team spirit is influenced by distance between team members. If they’re apart, they have fewer chances for live meetings. They also experience time differences, making it a challenge to meet up online. Cultural differences influence the way they collaborate, often resulting in miscommunication and misalignment.
On the hard side, there is a product or product portfolio. Different teams may be working on different products or on 1 product. There needs to be a central alignment. The more distributed the teams, the stronger the need for strong governance. Underlying the products is architecture. Roles like product owner, portfolio manager, scrum master are assigned based on a delicate balance of skill, knowledge AND location. Organizations need to decide where to form what roles in order to achieve company goals.
To balance the hard and soft side, teams try to establish a communication rhythm. With the right rhythm and agenda, they align on what each member’s working on (execution). Communication also enables them to transfer knowledge back and forth. To enable the communication they use certain tools. Tools follow the team’s communication habits.
The framework
Our framework consists of 8 bubbles that cover all areas that have an impact on distributed organizations.
The bubbles our framework covers are:
- Culture
- Communication
- Architecture
- Engineering
- Team
- Organization
- Product
- Tools
Within each of the bubbles, we have described 3 things:
A. Questions: these can be used by organizations to assess their current stage of distributed agile
B. Virtues: behaviors that help distributed collaboration
C. Practices: experiences by practitioners that worked for them
A and B are the core of our model. C is an open sourced, every growing body of practices.