Celfocus’ Coaching & Facilitation Community, composed of Agile Practitioners (Scrum Masters, Delivery Managers etc.) aims to build organisational capabilities through techniques and their theoretical and practical application, coaching, collaboration and facilitation experiences, in order to create and improve high performance Agile teams.

A year after the community’s beginning, circumstances are quite different, but the mission remains the same. And more than never, remote collaboration is fundamental to impact teams working under agile practices.

Remote work has become our daily normal, and the Community, which used to meet on a monthly basis, has decided to meet every two weeks in order to share challenges and difficulties within the teams and how these are overcome. The idea is to experiment, see what works and what doesn’t, and share with others. These first meetings focused on virtual interactions, collaboration tools for a remote context, and teams trying to create a new normal, while staying efficient, healthy and happy.

As a community, we have compiled a series of best practices shared by different agile teams that may support us all in this remote context:
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1. Being part of a team

• Make sure you participate and make your work visible. Do not join meetings with disable camera and muted microphone. If you don’t share a hello and a smile with the team you are not only prejudicing yourself but all the other team members. Doing so will encourage others to do the same, making everyone more comfortable to participate in the meeting.
• Find a tool that helps you check the well-being of your team daily, and see barometers at the team level, not individually, so people can be more sincere. You can choose from more simpler options to more customizable, like TeamMood or Office Vibe.
• As a team, adjust the forecasts and estimations to the uncertainty of this new way of working.
• Experiment pair programming and mob programming as well as different approaches for software development.
• Create a non-working hour agreement, avoid weekends and long-hours.
• Define golden hours, allow team members to manage their home duties and kids and being available for their colleagues.
• Increase the recurrence of 1:1 with team members
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2. Adjusting ceremonies

• Adapt Team calendar, adjusting duration of your current meetings, or create new moments of sync.
• Create a session for random topics except work and Coronavirus. Try having the typical morning coffee together, or after lunch dessert, or maybe enjoy a beer at the end of the day.
• Intensify meetings with the customer.
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3. Finding what tool best suits you

• Identify the channels needed and create them according to the topic and not by a group of people, this will keep information in the right place. Also, avoid multiple tools for communication. We have Microsoft Teams. Do you need slack? skype? Teams for the same group of people?
• Experiment virtual collaborative tools to facilitate remote ceremonies.
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As a Community, we believe it is important to share these experiments and thoughts with everyone, it helps create alignment, enhances our creativity and in the end, it increases knowledge, productiveness and happiness in our teams (regardless of the delivery methodology).

If you are an Agile Practitioner, contact devops@celfocus.com to join our Coaching & Facilitation Community. Also, if you have other challenges and ideas about remote work, your feedback is more than welcome.

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Article by Celfocus’ Coaching & Facilitation Community