How to Introduce Agile Methodology To An Extended Team

When working with an extended team, you will choose a team that follows agile practices. Hiring the right people can be tough; agile teams are the way to go if you want to survive in the modern market.

But what if you already have an extended team that hasn’t adapted agile development methods yet? To answer your question, we will discuss how to introduce Agile to an extended team.

But first, let’s get started with when you should opt for an extended team in the first place.

When to Opt For Team Extension?

Your Team Is Completely New To This

Sometimes, you might have to work on a project that your company has never tried out before, making your internal developers inexperienced on the subject matter. But you don’t want to assign additional resources by diverting more internal teams’ work to focus on the matter.

That’s when you must extend your team to bring in outside expertise to work on the project.

The Local Talent Pool Is Not Enough

Anyone can find great talents within their region to work on their projects, regardless of the scale of it. However, there are many niche skill requirements that the local talent pool cannot fulfill, and that’s where team extension comes in.

An extended team model allows you to fill the technical gaps of your team by allowing you to fill all the team roles by choosing the right expertise from around the world. That way, you have access to more niche talents.

The Local Market Is Expensive

While the local market is a highly convenient way to recruit the right talent as fast as possible, it can sometimes drive the budget up sky-high.

Since you and your potential candidate are within the same region, hiring a specialized expert with high experience can cost you an arm and a leg.

To solve the issue, it’s better to leverage offshore outsourcing to add the right talents to the team through team extension.

How Agile Can Overcome The Challenge of Managing Extended Teams

Agile methodology doesn’t just help organizations fix remote team collaboration issues; it can also help a business to grow.

Agile focuses on short-term goals rather than long-term ones. When the team delivers work in constant short and quick iterations, they can offer better productivity by constantly having high morale and work motivation.

Agile methods are the most effective for remote teams since they allow them to determine the right approaches that work for them and use this information to make real-time changes.

10 Steps for Integrating Agile Into an Extended Team

Self-organizing teams, high flexibility, and a high level of collaboration are all characteristics of Agile. While the implementation process may seem intimidating at first, it places a greater focus on project management and eliminates a lot of excess procedures.

Step #1: Agile Project Planning

Discussion and Project Planning

It all starts with a discussion between the product owner, the project manager, the development team, and all the internal and external stakeholders. The goal of the discussion is to determine the range and scope of the project and the ultimate goal the project wishes to achieve.

Asking the following questions based on the Elevator Pitch method can help you work on a better strategy:

• Do you know your target audience?
• What core issues do they have that they are trying to solve?
• What is the product?
• What is the benefit of the product?
• How can you make the product attractive to your target audience?
• How can it serve better than the products of other competitors?
• What makes your product unique in the market?

Building A Product Roadmap

Now that the strategy is ready, it’s time to build a project roadmap that contains the product vision. This step includes identifying all the steps, necessary resources, and required time for developing the software product and all its features.

Create A Release Plan

The team can complete project phases through short-term iteration sprints with agile project management. Each of these sprints is planned to deliver useful software features or a usable iteration of the whole software. Prioritize the core features first and release other features with later releases.

Sprint Planning

The development team plans each sprint in collaboration with the product owner. Each sprint covers several backlog items to complete within a certain timeframe.

Sprint Reviews

After each sprint, the team reviews the features and iterations they created. Certain features may get rejected; others will need more polish.

Step #2: Participate in Daily Stand-Ups With The Team

You should hold regular meetings to ensure the development team has no roadblocks due to a lack of resources or misinterpretations of instructions. In agile, these small daily meetings are known as “stand-ups,” and each meeting focuses on three topics:

• What task has been completed?
• What task is ongoing?
• Are there any issues that need to be resolved?

Since communication is the core of agile methodology, daily stand-up meetings remotely are a great way to keep the whole team on the same page.

Step #3: Organize Sprint Retrospectives

A retrospective improves after every release. Each time a release has been made, you should organize a team retrospective with the whole team. The retrospective will analyze the last sprint to evaluate the following concerns:

• Did all the steps go according to plan?
• Was the workload manageable?
• If the previous answer is no, how can you improve the process?
• What new findings did you receive in the last sprint that can improve the next one?

Step #4 Choosing The Right Agile Methodology

The nature of your project determines the type of agile methodology you are going to choose. While most of these agile methods are nearly similar, their unique characteristics offer different project scale and complexity benefits.

Some popular agile methodologies are:

• Adaptive Software Development (ASD)
• Behavior Driven Development (BDD)
• Dynamic Software Development Method (DSDM)
• Extreme Programming (XP)
• Feature Driven Development (FDD)
• Kanban
• Scrum

Step #5: Use The Right Collaboration Tools

Project management tools are a great way to maintain remote teams. Invest in the right application, preferably software that solves multiple issues in a single platform.

For example, You can analyze KPIs and other metrics with tools like Jira. A great tool can go a long way for remote teams since a remote team has to keep track of multiple factors, including:

• Managing different issues
• Progress tracking
• Quality tracking
• Reporting
• User stories or requirements

Step #6: Be Smart, Utilize Smart Metrics

Determine the right metrics and KPIs to help your team deliver the most value. These metrics include:

• Planned-To-Done Ratio
• Resource Capacity
• Work In Progress

Step #7: Ensure Frequent and Transparent Communication

Remote team communication is vital for better team management. It’s not just about texting each other; each message, call, or video meeting must have a purpose, whether discussing previous issues or plans.

When everyone’s evenly communicating, it’s easier to maintain a transparent development environment where communications are frequent and progress is steady.

Step #8: Create Documentation Whenever Possible

Though documentation is the second priority in agile, they’re still important, and it’s up to the team to take the time to create detailed documentation of the development progress so far.

Good documentation is like a video game checkpoint of development: new extended team members can easily pick up on the work of the older ones in case of a team change or team member swap.

Step #9: Manage Time Zone Variations

When working with an extended team, you’ll be dealing with team members who come from different time zones, and the goal here for you is to motivate and engage all the members promptly.

Ensure to make the most out of all time zone differences to establish 24/7 coding and allow for better flexibility. It’s best not to limit all team members to a single time zone since it can affect their morale negatively.

Step #10: Ensure Accountability

The workplace and the whole team should have a culture of accountability where all team members are accountable to the whole team, even though agile promotes self-reliance and self-organization.

To Wrap It All Up

Extended teams are good, but agile extended teams are even better. If you were wondering how to introduce Agile to an extended team, we hope we’ve provided enough information to help you.

If you’re looking to work with a world-class extended team, Impala Intech can help you with our team of professionals for you to take on any projects.

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