Like most Agile coaches, I often encounter organizations wishing to adopt (or improve) Agile practices in their software development, but struggling to overcome industrial-era management mindsets. This can take many forms, but one of the most common, and most pernicious, is the norm of optimizing for minimum resource cost. This has led most global organizations to establish off-shore teams where a portion of the development process is done by skilled but lower-cost team members overseas. While this model of spreading work around the globe may be effective for big-batch waterfall development efforts, it is anathema to lean agile teams.

The Sustainability Challenge

The Agile Principles tell us that business and solution developers must work together daily. Organizing a team in which the Product Owner and the engineers are on different continents defies this principle, and virtually guarantees limited interaction across the team. Highly productive agile teams further require nearly constant interaction between developers and QA engineers. Spreading these team members across multiple sites and time zones creates a high barrier to effective team interaction.

The Agile Principles also tell us that the most effective form of communication is face to face. Notwithstanding the proliferation of instant messaging and web conferencing solutions most of us use daily, it’s still very difficult to have meaningful, regular face to face communications between team members separated by a 12+ hour time zone difference. This causes team members to suffer significantly in their work-life balance, which makes the arrangement inherently unsustainable.  Most such teams I work with have full work days during their local business hours, but also routinely must attend late night meetings several times a week. Imagine putting in ten hours a day during normal hours, then being required to be on the phone for several hours four nights a week. How long could you do that before you burn out? How effective will you be at 11:00pm local time, after working a full day and caring for your family in the evening? How often will otherwise avoidable mistakes happen in such a context?

But We’re a Global Corporation!

I’ve encountered countless objections to the idea of truly co-located scrum teams in global organizations:

·      We can’t possibly have all our development done on-shore as costs will be prohibitive!

·      Are you suggesting we close our off-shore development center we’ve spent years building?!

·      We can’t possibly find qualified people off-shore to serve as product owners!

·      Our people will panic and quit if we undertake any significant re-organization!

Such objections are born of the fear of change and have been proved false in my experience. To be sure, though, this change resistance runs deep in most companies. Middle management will typically be the greatest source of resistance, as their roles, titles and performance evaluations are tied to the current norm. Even their incentives may be pegged to metrics which derive from the current model for distributing work. This means the norm cannot possibly be changed without the full buy-in and participation of these middle managers.

How to Overcome the Old Norm

First and foremost management education in Lean-Agile principles and practices is crucial to begin the change. Middle management must be engaged and actively participating in defining the new normal. They understand the current operation and the myriad risks and constraints they currently juggle to get work done. This group must be encouraged to adopt a Systems Thinking view of the organization and its value-delivery process. They must be empowered and encouraged to optimize for maximum sustainable throughput, rather than sub-optimizing for minimum resource cost or maximum utilization. They must understand that in a Lean-Agile world, it’s no longer their job to tell people what to do every day. Rather their job becomes designing the system within which people are enabled to do their work as efficiently and effectively as possible.

In most companies, the very structure of the organization will need to change substantially. Effective Agile organizations are structured around products and/or value streams the products support, rather than around functions like Architecture, Design, Development or QA. Methods like Value Stream Mapping can help management to visualize how cross-functional teams can be formed to support the products being delivered. At this point, management should challenge themselves to form complete teams in each geographical region or location, rather than routinely spreading teams across multiple geographies. Doubtless, there will be challenges where the exact mix of skills needed is not available in each location. This shows management where to invest in skills development or hiring.

The toughest case I’ve encountered is one in which it’s clear the right person to play the crucial Product Owner role is in North America, but the entire engineering team is in Asia. In such a case, management can ensure there is a proxy for the PO on-site with the team day in and day out to field questions, provide fast feedback as features are being developed, and bridge the knowledge (and timezone) gap between the team and the PO. This proxy will still share a time zone problem with the PO, but it will at least be less detrimental to the team’s productivity.

The Real Price Paid by Distributed Agile Teams

A quick Google search will show you there is a ton of advice in the blogosphere about how to succeed with distributed agile teams. Please recognize that if your organization is choosing this path, you are choosing to make your agile transformation significantly harder and more fraught with risk. Most teams that try to make this work suffer from poor collaboration, poor throughput, frequent failure to deliver on commitments, team member burn-out, and at its ultimate worst, outright product failure. Some teams find a way to make globally distributed agile work for them. More often, the conclusion is something like “we tried Agile but it didn’t work here.”