As the makeup of the technology workforce evolves, work environments are struggling to keep up with the pace of change. It is common for a project to never have all of the participants in the same room at the same time. Building remote teams is more than just dealing with time zones. Remote teams are:

• Sometimes a necessity
• An advantage to your business
• Increasingly becoming an ordinary part of your team composition

This session shares how a flat-structured, globally-distributed, fully-remote organization functions in an Agile and collaborative way. We'll discuss the tools, mindset, and strategies that we use to build first-rate delivery teams. Along the way we'll touch on how to embrace concepts like Open Source workflows, Modern Agile, The Heart of Agile, and Agile in HR.

If you are currently working with distributed teams or are about to embark on an initiative to build a new team, this conversation will provide a forum, blueprint and effective approach.

As the makeup of the technology workforce evolves, work environments are struggling to keep up with the pace of change. It is common for a project to never have all of the participants in the same room at the same time. Building remote teams is more than just dealing with time zones. Remote teams are:

• Sometimes a necessity
• An advantage to your business
• Increasingly becoming an ordinary part of your team composition

This session shares how a flat-structured, globally-distributed, fully-remote organization functions in an Agile and collaborative way. We'll discuss the tools, mindset, and strategies that we use to build first-rate delivery teams. Along the way we'll touch on how to embrace concepts like Open Source workflows, Modern Agile, The Heart of Agile, and Agile in HR.

If you are currently working with distributed teams or are about to embark on an initiative to build a new team, this conversation will provide a forum, blueprint and effective approach.

Often when organizations go through an Agile transformation, there are some concepts that are challenging to address or adopt. We have a tendency to avoid the ‘crucial conversation’ so as not to hinder progress. Eventually these fundamentals can get overlooked or "put on the back burner". At this point transformations stall, and we find that our process is operating more like a 2 week waterfall than an Product-Increment-Producing-Machine-of-Wonder. I believe this behavior is one of the drivers for the ‘scrum-but’ concept.

This session will delve into anti-patterns, bad smells, and other pitfalls which are keeping organizations from reaching the next level of Agile adoption. We’ll examine common warning signs and identify strong signals that indicate that a sprint time box is not being optimized. Once we’ve identified the challenges, we’ll explore best-practices, tweaks, and courageous actions to get teams collaborating in a first-class manner. 

In short:  Step 1: Understand what is hindering our Scrum practice. Step 2: Surface actionable remedies that we can apply tomorrow.