Webinar: Given to IT&Telecom SIG

Abstract: Working at a distance is now a reality for many of today’s work force efforts. We will explore how Scrum, when applied with care, can be used to setup and enable “well formed teams” across distances. Many of today’s work force efforts are forced to deal with non-collocated teams and efforts.

How does Scrum work in this context?
Agile methodologies warn how critical it is to co-locate teams in the same room, but this is not always practical. Distributed, distant, or “virtual” teams are a common reality of business today. Offshoring, flex-work schedules, multiple corporate offices, and other forces create pressures to achieve results even when team members are scattered across the globe.

Participants will learn strategies for enablement of agile distributed teams, based on re-world applied experience. These strategies will help teams overcome old habits of waterfall(rigid thought or process focused) behavior. And avoid common traps such as tools that focus the team’s energy the wrong way. Management direction to often gets lost in a sea of process, requirements churn and tools instead of manifesting as tangible, quality product.
How can we realize the benefits of Scrum/Agile product development – hyper-productivity, high-quality products, self-organization, elimination of waste, and rapid releases – when team members are not sitting next to each other?

This is the challenge of business in the 21st century: how to work effectively at a distance. This seminar is where you can start to meet that challenge: how to create and sustain tightly-knit, effective Agile distributed teams.

Learning Objectives
?  Enabling the power of self-organization – working with the component forces of distributed development to “pull” the team rather than “push” them
?  Agile attractors and Dimensions of Distribution- universal forces of effective product development, values for basic human interaction, and how to negotiate the complexities of team interaction face-to-face or miles apart
?  Setting up and improving your team’s protocols – examples of protocols that work for collocated teams vs. those that work for distributed teams, and criteria for evaluating your own team protocols
?  Improving collaborative behavior – leveraging multiple feedback loops both within the team and with those outside the team

Presenter: Doug Shimp, CSC, CST

Presenter Bio:  Douglas E. Shimp is a Senior Consultant and Partner with 3Back LLC in addition to a CST (Certified ScrumMaster Trainer) requirements/Use Case expert and Agile Process coach. He has taken an applied approach to his consulting practice and is regularly involved in helping others as a Senior Consultant by applying agile techniques in the context of client challenges. His work with different industry verticals has given him a broad exposure to common patterns of agile adoption, tuning and application. He is a speaker at annual conferences and delivers training events in Scrum and Agile methods.

He has 17 years experience in the technology field. One of his distinctions is his focus on the interaction of technology and corporate cultural issues. He is currently writing a book on “Advanced Topics in Scrum” He is certified ScrumMaster Trainer and Coach by the Scrum Alliance.