As technology improves and businesses’ outreach widens, what was once an opportunity for few to get relaxed working at home has now become a reality for millions of employees around the globe. The workplaces may never look the same after the coronavirus pandemic diminishes.
Switching to a remote work setup is quite challenging for both businesses and employees. The abrupt spike in remote working caused by the COVID19 pandemic has changed the entire business culture overnight. The coronavirus remote working boom has made modern offices obsolete and led to an increase in hiring for remote workers. The biggest tech giants such as Facebook, Google, TCS, and IBM are planning to extend work from home forever.
The remote work boom was recently highlighted in Zoom’s revenues report. The company officials said that they are seeing increasing demand for its product in the wake of COVID19 in every field, including remote interpretation.
As businesses are gradually adopting the COVID19 crisis, the agile teams are proving themselves to be a real source of competitive advantage.
The remote teams are well-trained to adapt to fast-changing business priorities, disruptive technology, and digitization.
The sudden shift to the remote environments with respect to the COVID has challenged the strategy and approach to managing remote agile teams.
Read also: Setting Up Remote Teams During Coronavirus: A CTO’s Cheat-Sheet
Here are some key considerations that help organizations making the agile remote working environment successful:
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Scrum meetings and calls should be held remotely. Ensure that all team members show complete involvement. Organize video calls whenever necessary.
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Document and circulate the action plan every day which is the scrum master's responsibility.
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Make use of remote tools ( Microsoft Teams, Slack, Webex, or others) for status reporting or any other discussions.
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Use project management tools for monitoring/tracking backlog items (Azure DevOps, Service Now, or others).
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Common repositories (code, documentation) are essential to incorporate and maintain.
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Enable virtual team building through remote chit-chat sessions, online coffee meetings, games, etc.
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Update your work status every day on the remote tools like (basecamp, slack or others)
What has emerged with this is the agile remote environment where the remote agile teams working are highly productive. Also, this approach reduces the cost of maintaining physical office space and also positively impacts the environment by minimizing the number of people commuting to work.
Read also: How To Manage The Huffs & Puffs Of An Offshore Agile Team
Agile has become super popular now. The agile mindset and methodologies help product development outsourcing teams to understand how to work efficiently and effectively when working at different locations. It provides companies with super speed, innovation, and greater customer focus.
How does an agile style of work benefit an organization?
Agile Remote teams can bring more complexity, communication gaps, culture gaps, time zone challenges, skill gaps, and lack of transparency -- if we let them. Businesses can also thrive and explore more benefits of remote teams while addressing the challenges.
- Less overhead costs to the organization
- More access to talent and skills
- Around the clock coverage
- Work/life balance for team and individuals
- Increased clarity and communication
Putting it all together
This is the future of work that has arrived abruptly resulting in the emergence of the digital revolution. The changing curve of remote working culture has undoubtedly accelerated leaving digital changes that go beyond setting up the technology.
Maybe tomorrow we can contemplate the productivity benefit that remote working may bring for the long term. But, today, we do not have a choice as it is the need of the hour.
