10 tips for agile teams going virtual

1. 1. 1. Show your face
         Develop trust and engagement in virtual meetings by turning your camera on. It’s much easier to follow along with a conversation and know when it’s your turn to speak when you see visual cues.
      2. Two ears and one mouth
         Most laptops come with a built-in microphone and speaker. However, if you want to hear your team and you want them to hear you, invest in a good headset with a combined microphone. This has the added advantage of reducing background noise.
      3. You can still use a whiteboard
         The Agile Manifesto says the best communication is face to face around a whiteboard. Many collaboration tools now include built in whiteboards, so now you can be virtually face to face round a whiteboard.
      4. Go to the water cooler
         Being remote removes our natural ability for people to randomly bump into someone and start a conversation. Start a channel in your chat tools, such as Slack or Teams. for water cooler chat. Just random stuff, funny gifs, interesting web pages, etc.
      5. Invest in the right tools
         As a minimum, you’re going to need tools that provide you the ability to hold virtual meeting with video (eg Zoom, Webex), share content and files (eg Dropbox, Confluence), chat (Teams, Slack), and plan work (Trello, Jira).
      6. Master your tools or they’ll master you
         Many of the tools are simple to use but it’s always surprising to see how many people still struggle to share their screen. Spend some time as a team ensuring everyone knows how to use them and make sure at least one of the team is a power user who can discover the funky features and integrations available in each.
      7. Keep things transparent
         There’s always that doubt what folks are up-to as you move to a virtual team and it can easily spiral into a culture of mistrust. Fortunately, being transparent goes a long way. Ensure the status of anything you’re working on is kept up to date, so anyone who might be depending on that item for the next step knows where you’re at.
      8. Be wary of cabin fever
         Humans are social animals. You’ll start to miss the social interactions that you normally get in the office. You’ll even miss the rubbishy commute that got you outside briefly. Make time to get outside and top up on your vitamin D you’ll feel fresher for it.
      9. Virtual pizza
         Just because you’re now remote doesn’t mean you can’t do things as a team. If you normally had a pizza delivery on a Friday you can still do that, everyone will just have to arrange their own delivery. Being online just means putting a little more effort into team and social activities.
      10. Forming, storming, norming, performing
          As your team moves online, the change can unpick their cohesion and your previous high performing team may find themselves back into a forming state. New norms or ways of working will have to be established. Spend some time as a team agreeing a new charter. For example, when do you have to be online and connected and when can you just be getting on with work and not be connected. How do you all want to keep in touch? How will you manage the increase in online messaging?

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9th April 2020
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