What are your thoughts on agility vs. working from home?

[Norbert Voßiek]

During covid we have seen a lot of team members staying at home.

What are the pros and cons of practicing "working from home" with regards (and only with regards...) to the driving force behind agile behaviours: "pleasing their customers" (Agile Manifesto).

Cheers folks,

Norbert

[__ Jimi Wikman]

There is none.

Agility comes from communication and as long as you continue communicating with your team and the rest of the organization you will be just fine.

If you are working in ideation where your UX team test theories that will be no problem at all. UX professionals have done that for decades on remote and in person. Ideation sessions and collaboration does not require physical presence, even if it helps a lot.

If you work in development as a frontend or backend programmer, then you just need to make sure you have a lot of time scheduled to understand the problems correctly. Use the morning meeting to ask for help clarifying things and to work with someone on the plan moving forward. Also make sure you have a strong dev lead that can keep the code together by calling for meetings when things are getting messy.

If you work with the UI design, well you are on the same level as the UX designers so see above.

If you are a tester, then you just need to have close collaboration with the developers and requirement analysts to make sure you can test properly and know when to test. Having the release version for each environment and a shout-out when something is about to be deployed is always good.

If you are a requirement analyst, or business analyst if you work on the business side, then it is workshops as usual and more planning to get the information you need.

If you are a manager, then make sure you use the morning meetings to ask for information you need and to give information the team needs. Make sure the team use some form of task manager so you can stay on top of things so you can answer stakeholders concerns or re-prioritizing mayhem.

The advantage in working from home is that you have the time for focused deep thinking (assuming you manage your time correctly and don't get sucked into meeting hell). The Disadvantage is that it is less efficient to brainstorm together because you will miss a lot of body language being stationary behind a camera.

+ Easier to focus and do deep thinking
+ Less social anxiety (introverts like this)

- Less social interaction (extroverts dislike this)
- Less control which can lead to micromanagement and/or meeting hell
- Communication is slower and have less body language present

That is my very short thought :)

[Bill Sheboy]

Hi @Norbert Voßiek -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

From my perspective, what you ask depends upon your team's interaction, maturity, agility, and development methods.  Specifically, what does your team mean by these things?

Short of everyone having expensive, immersive, remote-working hardware, and a well-crafted working agreement, there really isn't a substitute for face-to-face people interaction.  That working agreement idea is key: no amount of remote-work technology will help if people do not agree to be present when the team and stakeholders interact: on video and on audio.  When they are present, there are fewer challenges with remote work.

I recommend reading posts in these (and other) communities where people try to improve such things with asynchronous communication (e.g., messaging, assigned work, etc.) and cadenced "fun time" gatherings, sometimes leading to reduced collaboration, less value delivered to production, more spec-based work, and less agility/flexibility to their stakeholders.

And it doesn't help that some leaders consider many remote interactions as "meetings" and not "hands on the keyboard time".  (When teams were pairing or mobbing in the office together, would those consider that a "meeting"?)  Thus helping leaders see the value of teams and their interactions is the same, remote or physically co-located.

Please consider: how would you and your team evaluate the pros/cons you asked when the team was working together in person?  Was this ever a retrospective topic?  Now consider how those things have been impacted by remote-working constraints relative to things like the Scrum/agile values.  Then create improvement experiments to mitigate the challenges and leverage the benefits.

IMHO, there are no best practices, only better ones.  By continually looking at what is helping or not, and trying to improve we can find the better ways to try.

Kind regards,
Bill

[__ Jimi Wikman]

Well said Bill.

[Shawn Doyle - ReleaseTEAM]

I don't see them as being mutually exclusive.