With the holidays I somewhat took a break from blogging on our work on the distributed Agile case, but there are still quite a few things there that I wanted to share to hear what do you think. This one is a bit scary since I picked up some ideas from linguistics without having a proper reading of the work behind it, but at times this is the price to pay* for sitting between research and practice.

So, the picture on the right is a simplified version of the work of Herbert H. Clark:

According to Clark, in order for one person to understand another, there must be a “common ground” of knowledge between them. He shows how people infer this “common ground” from their past conversations, their immediate surroundings, and their shared cultural background. [This is from a back of Clark's book "Arenas of language use"]

In my terms: communication is enabled by the common ground between the participants and, in turn, contributes to building more common ground over time. Taking it a bit further, it is useful to distinguish between two components of the common ground:

• information that the participants share (not necessarily explicitly, as it is often assumed that others know about X because of shared cultural, educational or work background) – I talk about shared knowledge and awareness of the bigger picture here
• relationships between the participants – knowledge about each other and trust

Now to the distributed Agile teams. At a starting point there is a big distance between the team members:

• different locations that make it difficult to rely on team-building and ad-hoc interaction that naturally happens in a co-located team;
• time differences that in some cases provide only a small window of opportunity for interactions;
• different cultures, organisations and levels of technical expertise create difficulties of getting a team “on one page” needed for seamless work.

Distance between team members across different locations creates a vicious circle:

• lack of common ground, the need for using technology and addressing time issues make communication challenging
• challenges in communication make it difficult to overcome initial differences between teams, to build relationships and shared understanding of the bigger picture behind work

This picture is not that far from what you can learn by reading about the challenges of distributed Agile and solutions to address them, but hopefully it can help to address the problems in a more systematic way: spending time on establishing shared understanding and relationships in the team (especially in the beginning) and finding ways to shape communication processes and tools that not only allow to get things done, but also contribute to growing awareness and relationships over time.

My personal “hobby horse” is around the last point. From what we have seen, the communication in distributed teams often shrinks to purely functional and, compared to face-to-face settings, there is much less unstructured informal interactions – this works for getting the work done (at some level), but seriously limits the opportunities to build awareness of the bigger picture and relationships. Most of the solutions in respect to building the common ground in distributed Agile teams still rely on making sure that there are opportunities to visit each other, while there is a lot of space for a technology-mediated ways to do so next to the f2f.

* The ideas behind this post are grounded in insights coming from research on computer-mediated communication and distributed teams, but I need more time to read papers and to integrate research ideas in a systematic way. Hope to blog about it soon.

• Shrunken communication in distributed teams (the egg of communication :)
• Why sharing a team room might be not so good
• Edges

As promised – more thinking from our project looking at the challenges in distributed Agile teams. One of the first things we have observed was a heavy focus on goal-oriented communication between people in different locations: they would talk (this includes ‘type’ :) about solving particular problems around work, but hardly anything else. I drew a picture to explain what happens in this case that others found useful and quickly nicknamed “the egg” – so, here it is.

You can look at communication in a team across two axes. The first one (horizontal) is about what triggers it. I find it useful to distinguish between goal-oriented and opportunity-driven communication:

• Goal-oriented communication is about work-related problem solving and coordination. It’s the task at hand that forces you to approach others to sort out things with them. This is the case where you wouldn’t hesitate to plan a meeting, send an email or pick up the phone to call.
• Opportunity-driven communication is about things not 100% necessary, but potentially useful, or, even, not very useful, but just said at the moment (“good morning everyone!”). Think of the cases where you wonder if your email is ‘spamming’, add “by the way, do you also know…” or most of the conversations at the coffee corner. In this case communication is triggered by an opportunity – bumping into people, interesting things happening, ideas floating by or just an awkward silence that forces you to look for a topic to continue. This type of communication is piggybacking on something else: either happening around goal-oriented communication (e.g. side conversations at a meeting), other activities (having a coffee together) or observing others (e.g. seeing a colleague and remembering to ask them about something).

Vertical axis is about the ‘pre-arrangeness’ of communication (I’m not sure with the terms here, so any suggestions are welcome):

• Structured communication is expected and, to an extend, formalised. Planned meetings, promised memos and status reports are here. In this case there is time, space and resources needed to communicate (or, at least, nobody questions that they should be there).
• Informal communication is about everything else. It’s also expected, but in a more fuzzy sense (“let me know if there is a problem”). It’s not likely to be known in advance when and how it will happen, so it’s more difficult to allocate the resources for it.

In a co-located team all types of communication have place (the whole egg :). There are enough triggers for an opportunity-based communication and being in front of someone makes negotiating about time, space and channels for informal communication easy (you rather make a minute to talk about the thing, say “no” or make an arrangement about communicating later on).

In a distributed team communication shrinks to the basics (egg yellow :). From one side, when there is no “easyness” of face-to-face settings, we are likely to rely on structured communication, since negotiating time and resources for informal communication is more challenging (e.g. email might be not read for a while, phone is interruptive and costly, etc.). Informal communication is still happens, especially in the goal-oriented space, but the chances for it are lower, because it’s extra taxing (e.g. questions that would be asked in a meeting may not get get asked in email or IM chat). For opportunity-driven communication it’s even worse: lack of shared physical space results in far less triggers that might turn into a conversation: there are not many non-essential activities (no drinking coffee online :), it’s more difficult to observe others and even goal-oriented communication mediated by technology tends to be more “on topic” (from my experience “social talk” at a face-to-face meeting happens much easier than in a phone conference or email exchange).

There are quite a few more things to add here (in particularly about the negative effects of shrunken communication and ways to extend it), but nobody likes very long blogposts :)

• What a coffee corner provides, how to call it and a research agenda
• Being there together via presence and activity traces
• Life between buildings

First, a bit of the context: we are working on a project helping distributed Agile teams to identify challenges they have to deal with and to find solutions for them. Also, as much as I would like to make it a proper research project (with in-depth state-of-the-art review, large scale data collection and time to process all that), it is more of a research-based consulting: we observe a bit, interview some people, scratch the surface of what had been said on it and hope that our research backgrounds would help to fill in the gaps to come back with useful insights.

Second, a disclaimer: I’m not an expert on Agile software development, but have been learning about it in the past few months. And, while my research is pretty much about technology-mediated ways of working, research on distributed teams is not at the core of it. But all that shouldn’t prevent me from writing about it, isn’t it?

Now to the point. I’ll start from the values behind the Agile approach, as articulated in Manifesto for Agile Software Development:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Those values are supported by a set of principles and a variety of methods and practices that address those principles in practice. Now the part that is directly relevant to our case: while it’s not always immediately obvious, Agile methods are designed for a co-located team, articulated in one of the principles:

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

From one side, this makes the whole exercise of figuring out how Agile can work in a distributed team pretty pointless: it’s not designed for it. From another, there are various reasons for distributed Agile teams and examples where they work (some links). So the question is not if distributed Agile is possible, but how to make it work.

For me it translates into the focus on understanding what is actually happening face-to-face and then figuring out what of it and how exactly can be supported in a distributed settings.

This is a simplified picture of what we have observed in our case. It is heavily based on Scrum as a main method, which could be described in terms of roles, ceremonies and artifacts. In a sense those are the known ingredients for the success, so a lot of effort goes into figuring out how they can work when the team is distributed. This involves, for example, finding tools and adjusting processes to support ceremonies (e.g. daily stand-up meetings) and figuring out how to share and update artifacts online.

However, next to those known ingredients there is a big black box: co-located team. Co-location and face-to-face interaction is one of the cornerstones of Agile, but from what I’ve seen there is not that much understanding of what exactly happens there. Which is fine when the team is co-located – we have evolved to make the best uses of face-to-face and don’t even have to think of what and how we do. But when the team gets distributed that lack of attention to the black box results in all kinds of challenges. And, given that Agile philosophy places so much value on informality, putting efforts into articulating and formalising the blackbox ingredients doesn’t get much momentum.

So, this is more or less what we are doing in the project: bringing research instruments to open the black box and then working together with the teams to figure out how to make it work in distributed settings.

[As you have probably guessed two previous posts are directly related to this one: Why sharing a team room might be not so good and What a coffee corner provides, how to call it and a research agenda. More to come :)]

Update – don’t be surprised that I’m adding follow-up posts when they appear:

• Shrunken communication in distributed teams (the egg of communication :) – on the types of communication missing when a team goes distributed

• Being there together via presence and activity traces
• What a coffee corner provides, how to call it and a research agenda
• Blog as an edge zone