Scrum Virtual Transparency

Like many teams during the pandemic we had to transition more or less over night from working face to face (F2F) to working from home (WFH). From one day to the next we had shifted from not being allowed to WFH to not being allowed to work from the office, quite bizarre!

Surprisingly enough though, this transition has been very smooth, and here's why:

1. IT infrastructure already set up to enable remote work

2. Collaboration tools used these days such as Slack, JIRA and Confluence

3. Scrum values and pillars enable high transparency & team performance

4. A team that already knows each other and has already established trust

This transition came with three positive surprises:

1. The transition was seamless. I expected more issues, but of course most people were happy to be able to finally work from home :-)

2. After a few months of working from home I went on holiday. On my return I noticed that I got up to speed incredibly quickly, i did not even need to speak to anybody, no hand over required! I could just check the last Sprint Retrospective documented in Confluence to see what went well and where there was improvement necessary. By checking the Product / Sprint Backlog and Burndown chart in JIRA, I knew pretty much where we were in terms of the scope delivery status.

3. When returning from holiday I had almost no emails! This was primarily due to the use of Slack rather than email.

So, all in all a major improvement on how work life used to be. Of course, with WFH one still misses the social interaction with colleagues, but the infrastructure and tools are there these days to make the transition from F2F office to remote WFH seamlessly.

If you would like to know more about optimizing virtual team performance and making remote teams more effective please send me a direct message via Linkedin or email me at neil.millner@newworldprojects.com.