In fact, we are considering remote-agile as a new methodology of agile, same as SCRUM and Kanban, as we mentioned earlier in this article. Besides this, as every methodology, it has its own rules and processes, and expecting that anyone sticks to these rules and follows those processes will achieve his objective and deliver his product successfully, as we have done many times over the last 4 or 5 years. You will find below some rules that will help you to overcome the challenges of working – remotely, or to implement remote – agile methodology:1- Don’t accept requirement verballyIf we all agree that comprehensive documentation is wasting time and effort and hard to maintain, that doesn’t mean we can neglect it.2- Plan for the first releaseDon’t bother yourself or your team by planning too much for the future, instead, keep the focus on the first release and include all the basic and valuable features - as much as you can - in that release. This called an MVP - Release.3- No work without a taskUsing task management tools can make that easy, as anyone – if agreed – can add a task to himself to work, or some should be responsible to do that, as we highly recommend.4- No work without estimatingEstimation keeps the plan on track, and monitoring it against actual effort helpsearly detection of deviation and allows the team to take immediate correctiveactions.5- Plan for sprintsA week or 2 weeks’ sprints are more than enough to deliver something valuable,even not complete, don’t worry, continuing delivering will return with an optimumvaluable feature with minimal waste.6-Report earlyProblems and development issues happen all the time among all team membersregardless of their level of seniority, but maturity comes from early and continuesreporting of any issue that shows to be an embedment.That helps at most to take corrective action very early before disasters happen.7- RetrospectivesA reviewing meeting that should be held at the end of every sprint called a “retrospective” meeting, where everyone in the team gathers to discuss and determine the following 3 points:
P.S. KPIs and progress indicators with some graphs will help much more for justification.
CONCLUSIONManaging a remote and distributed team will stay a challenge for many companies’ managers, technical teams, and even Startups, as dislike the onsite team, you don’t have much control for every individual working with you, and even you may have to accept some changes of things you used to have in old ages, such as team structure, applied policies, trust code, management tools, and even team productivity and individuals’ utilization to keep your projects run, meet your Time-to-Market and ensure customer satisfaction. However, with applying a proper and effective process you can even reach more than you have expected, we advise you to go with remote-agile.