Coaching teams remotely - how do you do it?

[Johannes S.]

Hi everyone,

I am currently coaching a scrum team for about 2-3 months remotely. They are highly distributed (although all roughly in the same time zone) and working to build a strangler application to replace a legacy app they also built that's broken beyond repair. My role is to teach them how to achieve better quality by applying TDD, DDD and all the other XP Practices they need to be successful as an agile team. We meet occasionally in person, e.g. to do event storming for better understanding of the complicated domain. 

Things I tried so far:

Remote Mob Programming on specific questions/issues

    - Works quite well, we don't schedule these and let everyone who's available join in.

    - Doesn't reach everyone in the team though.

    - We only schedule one of these, when there's questions or issues. So it's our "swarming" mechanism.

    - I'd like to do this more often just to give feedback while they're coding but the team doesn't feel like it :-( I fear they're afraid their manager will see it as very inefficient.

Blog posts to share know-how

    - Didn't work well. Just a few people read the post (https://printhelloworld.de/posts/iteration-zero-architecture/) and liked it. Some more skimmed it, but most just didn't take the time.

Webinars to share know-how

    - Works quite well, participation is high and people are asking relevant questions. We also record those (Skype for business built-in feature) for future reference and people who couldn't attend.

    - Takes A LOT of time to prepare these. I would like to cut down on that time. I usually spend like 1-3 Days on preparing a 1 -2 Hour session. Sometimes it feels like a waste of my time... 

Driving to a team member to do a 1-on-1 coaching session

    - Works well in the beginning to establish some rapport. But it's expensive and annoying to me,  so I probably won't do this more often.

    - I usually ask about their interests and topics they want to learn about and suggest some way they may learn it (workshop, book, blog, podcast, etc.)

Group text chat to make decisions

    - Awful. People just don't understand each other when communication bandwidth is so limited. We need pictures and moderation, see link below.

Group video conference to make decisions
    - Works well, once we made a few learnings. I talked about those in my blog: https://printhelloworld.de/posts/2018-06-making-architecture-decisions-over-http/ 

Here are some things I would like to try next:

Remote 1-on-1 coaching sessions

     - this might cut down on my travel time and still allow me to push some people to read a book or just realise a flaw of their own...

Have them prepare webinars to share their learnings

     - this might cut down on my preparation time for these sharing sessions and still allow the team to spread their insights... 

Pair Program on stories

     - I could use the pair programming sessions e.g. to teach someone technique and then have them present it to the rest of the group... 

Has anyone of you worked with a team like this? If so, what did work for you?

Regards,

Johannes

[André Dhondt]

Johannes,

Most of the coaching I do these days is remote.  You've listed a lot of good tools, but I'm not hearing the "song" I look for in team interactions.  As a remote coach, I am even more 'out of sight, out of mind' than I'd be on-site, and this gives me some advantages. I can listen in on any ceremony I want (but definitely I don't listen to all of them, to be sure the team doesn't rely on me).  I can look at CI servers and review check-in logs. So--I'm a fly on the wall.

As a fly on the wall, I'm looking for conflict that remains un-stated. Many teams are not good at dealing with conflict, and when I find it, I help the team or the ScrumMaster find a way to facilitate a resolution. I also listen for strong emotion in any of the team interactions, and then go find out what caused it.

Is any of this helpful? It's hard to put it to words, I must admit, though happy to elaborate.

--

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lonely Coaches Sodality" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lonely-coaches-sodality+unsub...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

D. André Dhondt

mobile: 215-805-0819

[Ron Jeffries]

Hi André,

On Aug 22, 2018, at 9:09 AM, André Dhondt <d.andre...@gmail.com> wrote:

As a fly on the wall, I'm looking for conflict that remains un-stated. Many teams are not good at dealing with conflict, and when I find it, I help the team or the ScrumMaster find a way to facilitate a resolution. I also listen for strong emotion in any of the team interactions, and then go find out what caused it.

Is any of this helpful? It's hard to put it to words, I must admit, though happy to elaborate.

Perhaps you could tell us a story of a time when you did this?

Ron Jeffries

ronjeffries.com

If it is more than you need, it is waste. -- Andy Seidl

[Pierre Neis]

That´s a great question and a big work in progress on my side.

Most of the teams and people that I coach are remote.

Unfortunately, tools can be helpful in that case to make the conversation is "co-located" as possible: Zoom by example-

By experimenting with a couple of things, I discovered that you have to change your way of facilitating ex. for a large retrospective, 10 people were on-site and 10 remote, all had a video on and in the room we had a wall of 10 heads (was fun). The topic was to improve our organization so I raise the question "what kind of agile is your agile?" and instead of having me asking, each mate asked his colleague creating a random interview involving everyone-

Other trick is using a slide on Google Drive with all attending and working on the same question or not.

In a very genuine manner, it´s all about how you are communicating.

Hope it helps... not sure 

	Pierre E. NEIS senior agile coach agile² GmbH m: +49 (0)160 998 724 49 a: Wilhelmstraße 4  69115 Heidelberg - Germany w: www.agilesqr.com

--

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lonely Coaches Sodality" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lonely-coaches-so...@googlegroups.com.

[Sam Laing]

Throwing in my 2c...

What is the trust like on the team? Do the team members interact in a fun banter way at all? If yes - what mechanism do they use for that? If no - I would start here, by getting them to know each other a bit better.

I don't work with remote teams (anymore) but my wife is a full-time remote dev - so I hear and see what works and what doesn't. The more non-work banter the better the collaboration and output is what I have observed thus far.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lonely-coaches-sodality+unsub...@googlegroups.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lonely Coaches Sodality" group.

To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to lonely-coaches-sodality+unsub...@googlegroups.com.