Remote Agile Team

Gain a competitive edge in the RAT race!

Small businesses have workers that are either in and out of the office servicing clients or not in an office at all.  It’s difficult to coordinate and track work and  information regarding the work is often lost between emails, text messages and other forms of team communication.

The Remote Agile Team or RAT approach and RAT Tools provide a simple entry point for addressing these business challenges.

Rationale

Small businesses don’t have time nor money to have employees trained in SCRUM. We don’t have lots of time to learn new terminology and to get trained in complicated software.

Remote Agile Team Environment is an approach leveraging the principles and values of Agile and the Scrum methods to bring an approach for achieving high performance teams to the millions of small businesses.

Roles

* Work Owner – responsible for identifying and prioritizing the work with the help of team and stakeholders

* MC (Master of Ceremonies) – responsible for making sure that meetings are short and achieve the planned meeting objective, making sure the work is visible to all team members and stakeholders that need to know and removing impediments to the team’s success in meeting the Work Week Plan

* Team – responsible for estimating the work, committing to how much can be done in a week, and self organizing to achieve the Work Week Plan

Artifacts

* Work Backlog – list of work items identified and prioritized by the Work Owner and estimated by the team

* Work Week List – list of work items that the team commits to completing in one week

* Work Item – an extremely brief description of work to be done (one-liner) where the work is identified and the reason for the work is identified. For example, order 100 sodas so that the attendees have beverages.

Meetings

* Weekly Planning Meeting – during this meeting the Work Owner or MC readies the work items and the team estimates the items believed to be needed for the work week. The team also draws the line on what they are willing to commit to completing.

* Daily Standup – each team member states what they accomplished the previous day, what they plan to accomplish, and if there are any impediments to completing their work items

* Weekly Review Meeting – the team shows what they have accomplished and the MC tallies the velocity (units of work) achieved in the Work Week. As part of this review the MC facilitates a retrospective where the team explores what went well and what could be improved