Dave Grabel - Globally Distributed Teams

[This article was originally published at AgileScout.com. You can find them on Twitter at @agilescout]

Introduction

Dave is a "recovering command & control manager!" Nice to see a little bit of transparency in the beginning. Before Agile Dave lead effective waterfall processes. So what is the reason to go to Agile?

"Change was impossible midstream."

A Tale of Two Projects - Flipping the Agile Manifesto

Two projects that Dave is working on use Scrum, but not completely. 

1. Project A was a project team of 25 people converting classic ASP to ASP.net offshore. - Successful project.
2. Project B was a project team of 150 people doing over 1000 Visual FoxPro screens converted to JSP web pages using BEA web portal offshore. - Failed project.

"Agile can be wrong, but it should only be wrong for two weeks. Because you retrospect every iteration."

If teams turn the Agile Manifesto on its head, it becomes ScrumBut. 

Dave gives us an interesting story about the two projects and told us the differences between the two teams. It was an interesting take on how to contrast successful vs. failed projects for distributed teams. 

"You can handle change by being responsive to the stakeholders needs, that's what Agile is all about."

The biggest takeaway would be that to work with overseas teams or distributed Agile teams, there needs to be some very solid processes in place to ensure your team is communicating and collaborating daily.