Mastering Agile in a Distributed World: Tools and Strategies for Effective Team Management

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Hello my name is Martin Thank You wit. I’m a professional scrum trainer with scrum da dark and also Microsoft MVP in your DevOps and I had I’ve been doing some live videos over the past couple of weeks. I noticed that many people are and I’ve been inspecting adapting on the things that other folks are doing and I think um this is going to become a regular session. I haven’t settled on the timing yet but I’d like to be able to answer a bunch of questions that folks ask. There’s been an interesting couple of weeks and in that regard and I’ve had a few people on Jim a few days ago and Daniel Vacanti last week to have a little chat. Um I’ve since upgraded some of my technology with Daniel we had some audio issues so I now have a monitor in my ear and I got a new microphone so I think these things will help a little bit.

The thing that I wanted to um chat a little bit about today is I got our question from somebody they asked on LinkedIn not everybody wants to ask publicly so I’ve added a link down here that you can go to and ask me a question if you don’t want to ask it publicly. You can always ask it publicly as well. I think one of my things are not working check you can always ask it publicly and seems to be online it’s just pretending it’s not okay.

Yep I think I’ve got a problem with that one let me just delete it and we had it um not that one that’s the one I want. One of my streaming services was not connecting properly I think these things happen they’re sent to try us so as I get set up with these things I’m going to figure it out so that’s me adding it back in again.

It says sending data but it hasn’t popped up and said it’s online yet so we will see I guess I’m going to have to go figure that out afterwards never mind. So I’m going to be doing a few of these I wanted to make sure that everybody was able to ask questions even if they didn’t feel that they would be able to see they didn’t want to know some everybody to know who they were that kind of thing so I set that up that was one of my colleagues who does some officers suggested that and I think that makes a lot of sense.

So the question that that I got and that I thought was a little bit interesting and was what are folks going to do with their teams now they’re they’re not effectively a distributed team what are they going to do with their boards how are they going to manage that information. So I want to talk about um three different platforms that I’ve used. They all have their pros and cons they all have their specific areas of interest and I think there’s a little bit of progression there. I don’t talk about that but I also want to speak a little bit about um what it says in the scrum guide around co-located teams. It doesn’t it doesn’t really mention co-located teams it says it’s better if people are able to work together same as it does in the agile manifesto and people work best if they’re in the same same location like having a team room having our stuff on the walls and having everybody together.

But the realities of the current situation mean that that’s not always going to be possible and while it does mention those things in both the scrum guide and I do manifesto it doesn’t say that they’re mandated it’s okay to have a distributed team there’s nothing wrong with that. You’re going to maybe lose some communication effectiveness but that’s the cost of doing it that way that’s just the way it is. There’s nothing that says you can’t do that so I want to make you feel like or I want you to have the expectation that you can still be doing scrum you can still be doing Kanban you can still be doing your agile practices even when you’re not in the same room that’s okay that’s no mandate for that.

The mandate for colocation or not the mandate for colocation the recommendation of colocation is really around maximizing those communication channels and we can do that maximization even when we’re not face to face. So there are tools we can use to store our backlogs priorities and boards on the internet so everybody can get access to them and in a way that it’s not just sitting in an excel sheet that everybody’s editing because that does not do well for for multiple and edits.

And so what I want to do is show you these three tools that I’ve looked at I’ve used all of these tools in anger. They have their pros and cons some of them are easier than others. The first that I wanted to show was GitHub so if I go to github.com GitHub does have the ability to have issues. I have our project here in GitHub repository and GitHub the onus is on the repository and then everything else hangs off that repository so I can go in and I can do issues which are pretty straightforward they’re not great for agile management it’s just our list of issues and but any of these issues can be added to a project.

So here I’ve added this issue to a particular project and it’s been added to the to-do column so I’ll get to do in progress and done and I can click the little cog and I can add it to as many different projects as I want and it will basically create an item on that project that is related to this item here. They’re not I think under the covers they’re probably separate items but from our perspective they’re kind of the same thing but it will show us some cross data between them.

So if I go over into projects and I can create as many sub projects to this repository remember repository is the main item and then projects are inside of that and where and I’ve not done a whole lot with this but I can add additional columns and I can edit the column I can edit the name I can add things I can copy a link directly to that column and I can drag things around inside of that world. So there’s an item that I added directly to the board and here’s that item that is linked that is when I click it it’s going to open the data from the other item rather than having another thing going on there.

This is a good tool if you are running an open source project as many are this is one of my open source projects and it has its limitations. All of the data is stored in the US if you are an enterprise company or any European or non-US entity that has to have private data then I would not recommend storing it in GitHub privately at the moment. If it’s a public project like it’s our open source doesn’t matter I have all of my stuff in GitHub as well but if it was a private project you might want to store it somewhere where you can control the sovereignty of the data and that’s that’s a big deal for many European organizations.

But there is also private repos if you’re a US company and GitHub as well and you get some of those features there so it’s a pretty straightforward tool lots people already understand how to use GitHub they like the features of GitHub and they can add that capabilities there. The second tool that I went to look at is actually a little bit of a step back from development and that’s plat tasks office.com and Microsoft planner is a small tool built into the office 365 suite and there is an app that works on your mobile phone that allows you to create boards and move items between those boards.

So at the moment they just call them buckets so if I do in progress done to create the same idea as we had in GitHub and then I just add a task I can add a task on there and then I can drag it between the boards. I can add additional information if I want like attachments and priorities and start dates and end dates and all of those kind of things and whether it’s started in progress or completed. So regardless of the the columns a little bit weird maybe but I can also add a little tag so I can make this one green I don’t know what that did did that do anything do I have to click it or is that just changing the label is a receive button okay I don’t know how that part of that works but I’m sure you can figure it out.

I saw a simple board it has really good mobile access which GitHub has good mobile access just for issues and wikis and source code it doesn’t have good mobile access for the planner. They are projects yet that’s okay I’m sure I’m sure they’ll get around to it at some point but this can be a useful tool and this can you can have tasks on here that link into your outlook tasks you can have stuff you just add to the board you can create charts and schedules and plan around this with notes. This is a good medium solution especially if you’re interacting or doing non-engineering work and you can add your plan to your calendar so you can see all of the things you’re supposed to be working on and you can add as many people as you want into the project.

You can see here I’ve got a bunch of guests in there there’s only two people in my Azure active directory that are like members of the item directory everybody else’s are is a guest this is part of my one of my projects. The other one that I want to talk about is actually might want my favorite one to use and and that’s Devdas your comm Azure DevOps is tool that is not always free. So GitHub are free for public projects office tasks the office comm Microsoft planner is free for or free as the bad word is included in your office 365 subscription.

So we’ll just I’ll be there which is okay but there is also the tools in Azure DevOps to look at as well. So if I sign in to Azure DevOps it’s going to sign in to one of my organizations so my nkd agility my company’s organization and here I have all of my projects listed. So in Azure DevOps project is at the top and then you can create multiple you can have one or more repos inside of your project so if you just have a small product that you’re working on you can have project and repo just being the same thing you one-to-one relationship which is actually what I’ve got here or you can create multiple repos inside of our project and by adding repos to that that like we just like you add projects to GitHub.

So if I go into my Azure DevOps process tools you can see that I have some wiki it’s very a little bit like GitHub in that regard it doesn’t have all the same features there’s a little bit of disparity between them but I have at boards and on boards I have straight work items this is the work item tracking systems this is just a list of the work items so I can see my active work items I can see work items I follow I’ve recently updated and I can add new work items of various types so it’s not just issues or just tasks like in the other two tools that I showed you have various different things.

I’m using a process here called the scrum process so I have put a backlog item which rolls up to feature resource up to epoch it has bugs it has test cases it has tasks that’s a bunch of different things but I have these entries so this would be an individual work item this one is a backlog item and this backlog item has a bunch of data associated with it just like in the other tools so description discussion and various things I’ve got a follow link but I also have additional things I can link to it and so I can link to development items so here there’s a pull request and this is a merged PR so that’s a commit and a pull request associated with it.

Ok I also link to existing other types of work items so either related parent-child I can actually link it to a GitHub issue by pasting in the GitHub URL I can relate all of these things together which is kind of kind of nice I kind of like that this is my tool of choice for these kind of things and so then if I go back into here and I go into boards on boards I’m going to have my cab on board so the default camera on board and has the same States as the work items so my work items here my product backlog items and bugs go from new to approved to forecast it to done that’s the the minimum you can have on the board is what you’ve got set up in the in the process but then each individual team that’s working in here and this tool in particular supports having multiple boards and multiple teams inside the same project.

So I could have and I do have customers that have 70 or 80 teams in a single project so single source code 70 to 80 teams working on one product they each have their own boards backlog sprints but they have some commonality and they can share things between the hidden link between each other’s stuff as well social dependencies and that kind of thing. So here I’m just looking at a board so this items in forecast state and I can drag it around and you’ll see that the state changes from new to approve the forecast it and once they get on to all the way to the end to done they should be locked off and finished that’s the idea.

So I can view it as a board a Kanban board I can control this and I can do I’d have some features telling me to control it. The first is what fields do I want to show on each item that’s pretty basic and then some colour coding rules I can set up so I can set it up that things glow if they’ve been changed recently or if they’ve been tagged by a certain tag that’s that’s always you can do that and set up annotations for items that are in GitHub tasks or tests you saw that I could link from that work item to other things if it’s tasks GitHub issues or tests they’re actually going to show up on this dashboard if you take that that box and tests have a special some extra features this is for manual testing not for automated testing.

So this is when you’re transitioning into being an agile team and you still have a lot of manual tests and you want to bring them on board and that’s all supported in here. I don’t expect a Joule teams to use a lot of this and then you can set up and control the columns so remember I said that the minimum set of columns are the columns from your work item so what what set as the states but I could take approved and I could break it into two I’m just seeing if I can move that up I can although I managed to click and do that.

So if I want to break approved up into two columns and I can insert to the right so this one I’m going to call it and [Music] refinement and then once we agree refinement is complete this one is going to be oh Teddy ready. Ok so refinement you can see the state mappings as the state that is on the work items and is the approved state will be in refinement and the ready state sorry the refinement column will have items from the approved state and the ready column will also have items from the approved state and the system will default them to one of the columns because we just split a column where there might be items in it and then you can move things between it and that allows us to each team even within the same project and can set up their own set of columns.

So you can say here’s the standard that our organization is going to follow and which is new approved forecast done that’s our standard everybody working on the one product has to have the work items floor that so we can understand what’s going on we can see a holistic view of everything in our product everything in our work that’s going on but then each team can go and set up and configure their boards however they like in order to facilitate them owning that managing that following their own individual processes because every team’s work might be a little bit different they work on different things they have different types of work that are going on inside that project that’s okay they can they can do that how they like and you can set up additional swimlanes.

So by default there’s only one horizontal swimlane but you could set up a swim lane for a particular stream of work and I in the same understanding as Daniel Vacanti in having different classes of work or classes of service is probably a bad idea it’s going to interrupt your ability to flow on your other work and you’re better just improving your overall flow so I would just leave it as default but if a team did want to experiment with an expedite except I can’t spell there we go and expedite lane then they can do that as well and then you can choose how cards are ordered.

So do you drag them in between if you have only a few things you might want to have a set up this way if you have hundreds of things on your backlog because you’re not that agile a team yet you know you’ve got 300 things in your sprint that can be a little bit much you can set it so the order doesn’t change when you’re dragging them around because that can be a little bit difficult and you can also display or hide two different levels of backlog so many teams especially scrum teams working with either just scrum or scrum and Kanban are going to look just at backlog items they don’t really care about anything else but if you’ve got much bigger teams where you have more than two teams working on one product you might want to enable features and epics as needed and then you can set up the workdays and whether my bugs are treated as backlog items or not that’s why I made a few changes there.

So I’m going to save and close that and you’ll see the changes in the UI it’s gonna refresh and you’ll see that I now have expedite lanes so if I create a new product backlog item I’m just gonna call it test because I’m lazy I can drag that in to expedite and then I can have I might I and my team might have agreed different rules for expedite than for the default lane and I can have things flow through the system like that so that that works pretty well on boards just setting up and managing Kanban boards it has whip limits it doesn’t force you to adhere to them this tool doesn’t really force you to do a lot and it kind of leaves it open for you to figure that out which is kind of the way I like it that’s how an agile team should function because each team should be able to choose to do things differently if they want to break their web them it’s that’s okay well they can monitor their data and see how that goes.

So I can do some analysis on here so this is I don’t have iteration set up so it’s not going to show velocity but it would show a cumulative flow I have one average work-in-progress because I don’t have a lot of work flowing across and this team hasn’t been worked on in a little while so you can set up some analysis these ones are the defaults and then there’s a feature timeline so you might have some kind of dates or expectations that you have to meet maybe there’s a big event coming up that you want to work towards or maybe have some features and they are available for and in order to do that oh I get new features in progress in the timeline so it’s not going to show me the features but I can create I have a feature timeline that shows that I can create an epoch roadmap which I also don’t have any epics so it’s probably yeah I don’t have any epics assigned so it’s probably not going to show that either that’s ok.

I’ll go back to boards so this is my backlog items board and all of those things well at least a board and analytics and are available at the backlog level and if I went in and enabled to do logs if I enabled features and epics I could also change to features and I would have our board which you’ll see it has only the default columns for features which is new in progress done that’s the default and I can break that out if I want that level but analytics is based on the features and then feature timeline is always features an epic word map is always epics because the expectation is features are something the way a lot of decisions has been made in this product is around as the way a lot of teams inside of Microsoft work because it’s a Microsoft tool and Microsoft use it extensively internally.

So backlog items are just backlog items features are looked at as something that you’re going to deliver and so while you might deploy a backlog item out to production it’s not a tangible finished thing that you might want to see a timeline of when are those things going to be finished what’s currently in progress at the moment for that feature. So if you think about it the development team and the product owner at the implementation level cared a lot about the backlog items at the feature level you’re looking at holistic units of things that go together backlog items obviously are broken down into smaller items and then epics are things that appear on your road back maybe a longer lived it’s gonna take many many Sprint’s to get them get them get them finished many releases to get them finished that’s the way that looks.

So that’s at boards in here it also has backlogs backlogs are super handy and I find to be very underused with teams so in here I just have a list of the items that on my backlog and I can drag and drop them to order them I can also go and stick them in sprints and I can configure and control the sprints and set them up so that will let me set up my backlogs and again it has analytics and access the feature type line and the epic roadmap there’s they’re the same. So what can view that as a board or I came for so if I go to oh wrong button views a board it takes me back here views a backlog it flips to that other view so backlog is the view board is also a view and it’s the same data it’s the same data so I can use this across multiple teams the boards even have auto updating so if you’re looking at it on multiple screens it will automatically update as you go through which is kinda nice.

So I’ve already talked about those features but now I’m in a backlog view I’m not sure that’s gonna configure the team settings so it’s just gonna have that yep and so the current sprint plus whatever other ones you have currently figured configured are going to be listed in there. There’s lots of different ways to set up and configure Sprint’s I have a number of blog posts on how to do that for one team and how to do that for hundreds of teams working on one product and and also how to do lots of different products inside of the one project as well which many organizations do for various reasons and so I have a lot of blog posts on those topics you can go look at those.

You can also if you are a scrum team and not just a Kanban team or you’re a scrum and Kanban team or a Kanban with a little bit of scrum team or just a Kanban team or just a scrum team all of these features work well you would just ignore that sprints tap because you wouldn’t need it but if you are using that you’ll see you can have your PBIS that have brought into the sprint pin to the left and you can have break that down into tasks that then flow across the board.

I recommend working as a team using the Kanban guide for scrum teams I think it’s really important to have good metric cross-cutting metrics that you can rely on and user stories story points and velocity it does not give you that it might give you that for one team early on in their maturity level but if you want to mature scrum team they need to start looking at the Kanban guide for scrum teams and bringing in some of those more advanced metrics to look at but in here and I’ve got my task board I can see that’s so that’s my scrum board you might call it but it’s just a list of tasks relating to the things on your backlog and I can look at the breakdown of my backlog.

So let’s see and might a sport and I break this item into task 1 task 2 there we go and I can go to the backlog and I’ll see that this has been broken down so they’re actually related and if I open that task 2 you’ll see as a link up to the pbi product backlog item that I have there it’s pretty straight for kind of like you would expect it to have um.

So there are some other tools there are some teams out there that like to look at their capacity and plan towards that so this is not meant as a project management tool it does not have the features that you would expect in a project management tool however if I’m a team and I just want to get an idea of what my capacity is for this sprint as opposed to the previous sprint or I have people who take on different sets of tasks I can add some of those things in I tend not to use those features in capacity I just ignore that to be honest I now tend to ignore the task board as well but if I have an immature team I might have to look at one of those things I might need some of that data and then hopefully as we scale up the team as we scale up the project and the people around we can start ditching some of those things as well.

So I can view this either from our backlog basis or I should be able to change that - so it’s filtering and where is view options there we go so instead of looking at it from a backlog items on the left and tasks I could flip to people on the left and what tasks are saying to them flowing across and I can also have work details and planning so I can move things to other sprints and do those things all in the UI and I can create queries if I just want to go find a bunch of work items or I want to load them out into Excel or for don’t do it but if you need to load them into MS Project you could do that as well but don’t tell anybody you can just create a query build a query in here for finding work items in your system emailing them around all of those kind of things.

There’s also a tool called plans which is about how do you plan work for multiple teams working together and it allows you to create plans add teams and their backlogs to the plan and see what’s going on across our much larger team. So if you had an access and you were using the nexxus framework you could set it up and it would also support things like safe they would support more non agile methods like say for waterfall or other things you can you can do that in here.

And if you’re following more agile techniques so you’re looking at DevOps you’re looking it at scrum you’re looking at time and you’re looking at any of the reducing cycle time figure it out as you go along ideas then you will be able to use some of these features in that way as well. Again it’s going to have features that you’re not gonna need if you’re in either category or features you’re not gonna like to use if you’re in either category but it’s because there are lots of teams doing lots of different things.

Um I’ve also added a couple of plugins to this I have a tool from Daniel Vacanti actionable agile I just have the demo and looks like my free trials expired but this allows you to do some really powerful analysis of the data and as a tool from Vacanti from his companies or Google look up at actionable agile analytics. I also have dependency tracker in there which one of the MVPs built I think I don’t know what this will load might not be pretty because I haven’t used it in a while no there’s no dependencies based on my criteria but it’s all tools to play around with.

So those were the three tools and that I’ve used reasonably extensively I’ve also looked at and used Trello on occasion and I’ve also looked at other tools that are out there as well but not in any great great depth these are the tools that I’ve used in anger with teams figuring out how things go together how to organize that. So I’m going to take a quick look and see if there are any questions I think we’re not streaming on YouTube because it wasn’t working properly and but everything else is maybe no it’s maybe not I’m not going to percent sure I would need to go if there are any questions I can answer them.

I can also take questions on this URL that I will answer in the next session I’m quite happy to take that in the next session and if you come back to our YouTube channel which is I don’t have it up there but it’s nkd agility net /tv you will get to our YouTube channel where everything streams on there except for this one because I think it’s not actually working so I will have to look at that after this and figure that out.

So if there are no questions then I will will have to figure out why YouTube’s not working never mind. So hopefully um you got something useful out of this I’m going to share Jul this I’m not a hundred percent sure what that schedules going to be yet but I’m going to come up with a schedule for the office hours where it’s just you know come and ask me some questions and I’m also going to come up with schedule for the webcast that I’ve been doing a live webcast where I have some talk about some stuff I do some presentations get some people in to talk about things.

Okay well hopefully this was useful for some folks and anybody who comes back later please use the ask and see if we can’t find some other awesome questions to answer. Okay thanks very much. Naked agility is available for DevOps and agile training and consultant contact us for a free consultation.