5 steps to build a great team in the midst of a pandemic

Is it really possible to create an organized and functional agile team 100% remote? Even if neither the Company nor the team members have any experience of working from home full time?

The choice between trying and not trying was easy. To avoid losing speed we sought the competencies we needed both internally and externally. After two weeks, we had enough people to start.

Read on for the 5 steps we think were key when we built an awesome distributed team!

Step 1. Find a good mix of people

As always in cross-functional agile teams, you need a good mix of skills. When starting a team with people who cannot come to the office, it’s especially important to also have a mix of “old” and new people. Meaning you need to bring at least one or two people who “knows their ways around” the company, who have lots of valuable connections and have a pretty good knowledge of the architecture and the toolchain that is used. We managed to engage a person with several years in the company who had been developing and supporting some of the development environment and tools. This proved to be a great benefit!

Step 2. Join the team

In our opinion it’s a lot easier to kick-start a team if you are part of the team, it’s always harder to do it from the sidelines. So as the engineering manager and the agile coach, we started out as co-Product Owner and co-Scrum Master and then gradually shifted the responsibilities over to the real PO and Scrum Master. We spent a lot of time with the team the first few weeks and then gradually let them “run the ship” themselves.

Step 3. Spend lots of time workshopping in the beginning

We spent a lot of time together in workshops in the beginning, we think this is crucial. Especially important is to discuss what the purpose of the team is: What are we supposed to do and not do? What is our vision and our goals? How can we measure if we are there yet? Equally important is to get to know each other: What makes us motivated? How do we want it to be in the team? The third part is how we work. Since we are an agile organization and some of our team members were fairly new to agile, we spent quite some time talking about the foundation of agile and about the importance of getting to know the users and making sure you are building the right thing.

We used advanced whiteboard tools like Miro and Mural for the workshops, they make it a whole lot easier for everybody to participate on equal terms. We prepared the boards with “slides”, pictures and models that we used as starting points for our discussions. We also had more of a “workshop backlog” than an agenda to allow the discussions to take the time they needed.

Step 4. Make contact with stakeholders early

When you start working at a new company and you work from home, it is difficult to “become a part” of the company. It’s hard to get an idea of how people work, it’s hard to get to know the people you need to know and it’s hard to understand the culture that prevails. As the team manager or coach, you can help the team with this — encourage them to quickly book meetings where the team can meet other teams, important stakeholders, user groups, etc. Also help them find the right digital communication channels — Slack channels, Teams teams or whatever you may have. Send invitations to other teams’ demos and tell them which communities of practices they can join. Our team was extremely quick to become part of the company, after just a few weeks they had a relatively good view of the company and they quickly started to present themselves, the team and their mission to the rest of the company, both in video meetings and via blog posts and the like.

Step 5. Encourage collaboration

When everybody is remote, it’s a bit harder to get into the habit of actually working together. It’s very easy to write some User Stories, split them into tasks and then pick one each to work on. This is of course NOT what we want, software development is a team sport! Encourage the team to work together as much as possible — set up a Teams meeting that runs all the time, ask them in the daily standup which tasks they will work together etc. We have a great Scrum Master in the team who really understands this and that helped a lot. The team fairly quickly got into the habit of mob-programming, solving design problems together, running regular UX ideation sessions and so on. This in turn boosted the process of the team members getting to know each other, which in turn resulted in the team starting to deliver value extremely early on.

Hilda Stenberg, Development Manager SVT

Håkan Rudelius, Agile Coach SVT

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