Saturday, July 19, 2008

Distributing teams is a silly thing to do

I'm happy to see that more people are uncompromising and are speaking out against doing the silly things that people justify with "that's reality". We create reality and we can therefore change it. Where there's a will there's a way.

Tobias Mayer says:
"Distributed teams are not teams; they are at best a collection of people who communicate regularly. But communication is not collaboration. A distributed team cannot create the kind of energy that comes from human eye contact, from shared spontaneous laughter, from physical touch. True collaboration requires all five senses. Distributed teams require managers, and thus can never be truly self-organizing. Time differences and delayed response times inevitably slow down conversation, hold up decisions and ultimately cripple agility."
Distributed teams can never be that agile so stop pretending they can. Find ways to colocate. It's not impossible.

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Sunday, July 13, 2008

Inconspicuous authority

I talk a lot about facilitating self-organising teams. For a Scrum Master, a little more than facilitation skills and authority for the process is needed to ensure people interact with professionalism and demonstrate the right behaviours - respect, humility, empathy - at all times.

In most organizations, a Scrum Master is actually a manager and, sometimes, a Scrum Master has to step in when people 'misbehave', but the objective is really to help a team manage itself. The challenge for a Scrum Master is to develop a demeanor that hints at authority just enough to keep people true while giving them freedom. The question is how does someone develop such a demeanor?

I think what you say and how you say it plays a part. As does what you do and how you do it. But 'you' are the core. By that I mean you act by your values and are guided by your principles. And what drives you as a person determines the style in which you conduct yourself. This is what people see.

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