Practicing Agility—Transitioning To Remote Work

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.
— Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

The CTL development team has committed to refining our processes this year. The first round of reflection and experiments are captured in Tuning and Adjusting Our Agile Processes.

In early March, as the COVID-19 pandemic widened in New York City, our university transitioned to fully online learning and staff began to work from home. The week before the transition, we primarily focused on logistics—making sure all our staff had the equipment they would need to work remotely effectively.

My boss, Maurice Matiz, also posed the question, “how will our processes need to change to allow us to manage staff and ensure our work continues to progress?” I thought a minute, and said, “I don’t think we need to change much at all.”

Our daily stand-up meeting would (obviously) move online. I was hopeful that the sprint review and planning meetings would be equally seamless in a fully online environment. The one irritation: our team would have to abandon our much loved sticky note system and embrace Jira to handle our task tracking.

The first Monday “at home” coincided with a sprint review and planning day. I was anxious that our collective internet connections wouldn’t be up to the task, and that the longer planning meeting would be draining. Fortunately, the networks held up, and we managed to pull off all our usual ceremonies successfully. Since then, we’ve completed six sprints successfully. Seeing our shared process work so effectively has been a small bright spot during this difficult period.

Though the existing process has been supportive, we have all still struggled to maintain our focus and velocity. New York was long the epicenter of the pandemic, and our hearts and minds were (are still) with those who struggled with the coronavirus, the health-care community who worked tirelessly to help the sick, and the front-line workers who labored to keep the city afloat, despite low wages and frequent lack of protective equipment.

Team members immediately began discussing ways to stay on task. An effective pattern that emerged was daily project check-ins, one in the morning to set a goal for the day, and one in the evening to verify work had progressed. This strategy has allowed us to help each other in a meaningful way, and has had an immediate positive impact on task completion. The team’s collaborative approach and generosity of spirit has really shone through. I am quite proud to count myself as a member.

Unfortunately, we are still experiencing frustration with Jira. We are using epics and tasks in useful ways. Planning the sprints continues to be easier and quicker each week. But the actual task entry and management still feels awkward. In the last sprint we’ve opted to start sprint meetings at the project-level and assign a project lead or project manager to do the task entry. On the plus side, this results in tasks created with all required metadata and also draws our clients into the process. It’s too early to tell whether we’ll adopt this practice long-term. Stay tuned! I’ll continue to write about where our Agile processes evolve.