March 23, 2019

Many years ago, my very first attempt at being a Scrum Master, I was working with a team that had a mix of team members here in Toronto, one person in Montreal, and some people in Mumbai and Pune India.  Due to many restrictions with that company, a lot of the advantages of using collaborative tools like video conferencing, Skype, etc. were not permitted.  We had to come up with a different way to get that engagement from our co-workers that were distributed.  So what did we do?

This company did have a video messaging application that we were allowed to use.  It wasn’t perfect, but it did help to solve a problem.  I ordered a web camera that we would connect for every session that we had.  Our colleagues in India were allowed to see us, but couldn’t have a camera working on their end.  We also had our conference call, that allowed for us to have conversations.  Over the course of the year, we were able to build a relationship, and even joke around with everyone.  We even showed shots of outside, when there was heavy snow flying around!  India was fascinated to see that!  We did retrospectives virtually via a shared screen and our co-op student would enter the post it notes on screen to share as well.  This allowed for the whole team to be able to participate.

Fast forward about a year since we started with this way of including everyone in our Sprint ceremonies, one of our developers was brought onshore to Canada to support another project that we were working on.  My manager wasn’t available to meet him and introduce us to him.  So he asked me to meet with him at the doors at 9:00 on the Monday morning.  About 8:30, I heard him say, “Hey Stuart, glad to see you in person.”  As I turned around, it was our friend from India!  He did say that it was in fact the video conferencing tool that we used to help him recognize me since he arrived early.  He also admitted that us using the tools we had available did help in he and his colleagues feel more connected to the rest of the team.

So if you have team members that are away from your central office, please to whatever you can to bring them into the fold of the the team.  They are important people too!  If they feel engaged, they will feel as part of the team.