Agile is an iterative and incremental methodology that is created to simplify software development. It emphasizes meaningful communication and guides businesses to deliver fast and embrace change. Agile assists teams of all shapes and sizes to collaborate in a better way. These practices are flexible and can be easily adapted into marketing and other verticals.
Like remote teamwork, agile software development is here to stay. Let’s understand how the two of them can be united. So, how do you successfully implement an agile approach if you already have a remote team?
Here are some ways in which you successfully turn your remote marketing team into an agile one:
1. Understanding the Difference
Agile methodologies focus on collaboration. They have a daily meeting, put up sticky notes here and there, and round table talk frequently. All of these things rely on teams sitting together. Basically, it’s also about adapting to change, tightening feedback loops, and continuous learning. However, all this can be quickly done without a team sitting together physically. You can take the help of tools for recreating all that is stated above. But going too far with this isn’t the right way; it is better to accept the distributed team’s reality and realize its power.
2. Establishing Norms
Remote working can be converted into an agile one when you accept the reality of remote work, realize its power, and start adopting practices that make sense with respect to it. You can achieve this by facilitating collaboration between the two.
For example, make remote teams of the members who are in similar time zones. You can create a set of “core hours” in which team members are available to have discussions via chat. In a traditional setup, everyone reaches at 8:30 am and leaves at 5:00 pm. You can still achieve the same result by establishing norms and mutually agreeing to the set rules and timeframes.
3. Scheduling Get-togethers
The sheer lack of team cohesion always comes up whenever people cite the problems with remote work. Participants feel disconnected when they’re working alone, talking only over chats and conference calls. It doesn’t give the same feel as in-person collaboration. However, you can still build camaraderie without replicating the office experience with remote teams. Have meet-ups once in a while and go out for some meals. Team members gel better when they sit, laugh, and eat together. You can get an excellent return on team dynamic with this relatively small investment.
4. Start Using Telecom Tools
Another way to get the most out of your money is syncing communication that involves agile ceremonies. Strive to have these live, using teleconferencing tools, regardless of whichever ceremonies. Talk on video; see each others’ expressions and body language while doing so. This will only take 2-3 hours per week for the entire team, and it is doable in all sense.
5. Begin Leveraging Collaboration Technologies
There are collaborative activities like pair programming, but they don’t go too smoothly when you’re remote. So it might not be a good idea with your distributed team. However, you can check on the latest technologies that may help you with this. For instance, Screen Hero (now part of Slack) specifically lets people share screens remotely. All such tools can never replace sitting together, but they allow you to imitate collaborative meetings to an extent. It’s better to see how they work for your team after trying them out first.
6. Start Working As a Remote-first Team
The companies that bill themselves as remote first deliver some of the best remote work success stories. They embrace the reality of remote work, optimize it for their benefit, and make it work in their favor. They begin by defining processes from the outset that makes complete sense. They leverage cloud services and automate build and deployment from end to end. From the beginning only, they make sure that meaningful collaboration can be recorded for later reference. They play to the strengths of distributed environments, making them agile non-negotiable from the same day.
So if you want to be agile, don’t go halfway. Never pretend that you and your team are all sitting together when you are not. Understand that this might sometimes cost you something. But also understand that you can lean into it and gain profit from it too.
