"But this is so much work..."

As many of us have discovered, coordinating three or more Agile teams is a lot of work, especially when the teams are scattered around the globe.  I “borrowed” the title of this post from Cohn’s book ' Agile Estimating and Planning', where he mentions the pains of coordinating large projects and suggests some ideas on how to deal with this situation.  For the Performance Manager group, a key item is our intense system of communication that never sleeps (literally, in some cases). 

Two of our most popular methods of communication are well known in the Scrum community, even though they serve additional purposes with our multi-cross-continent-time-zone setup.  First and foremost, daily Scrum of Scum (SOS) meetings occur with leads/leaders from every team, and these meetings occur early in morning (US time), so they are friendly for participants in India, Israel, etc.  During these meetings, all of the teams get a chance to hear what’s going on across the teams and determine whether roadblocks exist within another team that may cause a problem for other teams.  An important aspect to keeping these meetings short and productive is focusing on what’s being done or on blocking items affecting other teams.

A second important method of communication is our iteration demos, which occur every two weeks during non-hardening iterations.  Again, these are done at globally friendly times, and all of the teams get to see what the others have done.  This provides a sanity check for consistency and allows each team to accept critiques on the work from the past two weeks.  Since these meetings are recorded (via Live Meeting), the support teams and others can always use these meetings as on-going training for the new release well in advance of it being made available to customers. 

In all cases, the communication methods are setup to create total transparency and prevent passive-aggressive behaviors.  As transparency increases, the teams become more comfortable with being open and potentially “exposed”.  The main goal is to make small course corrections instead of having big rework items, but the process never gets put on cruise control because the fleet can quickly run aground.