How to Get Remote Teams to High Perform

How to Get Remote Teams to High Perform

Raise your hand in case you feel confused about project progress. How often do you ask about the current status in *Slack*?

We have seen such problems and would like to present our 5 techniques to have a transparent process and build trust within the team both internally and externally.

Ask for Asynchronous Stand-ups — to keep you in the loop

Communication is key, but developers find 500 reasons to skip it.

They are busy with more important activities like product development advancing. But “being busy” should not become a sacrifice of trust-building with other members.

We found a solution to this problem — Async Text Stand-ups. This is the best tool to have an over-communication in the team.

Every day, we share the following via Slack: a snapshot of progress, and a vision of what’s next. It eliminates the waste of time on developers' micro-management.

Also, we have Weekly High-Overview “Stand-up”. Compared to daily stand up, here we share team overall results, problems of the last week, and next week's goals.

Tools: *Slack*

Good posts on how to do this right:

• Slack Tips Tuesday: How a Developer’s Daily Update Should Look

• Take most out of async textual stand-ups

Setup Kanban Board — to see the state of every piece of work

Kanban resolves so many problems: scheduling, monitoring, and debugging problems of your process. It’s the best tool for Lean Startup followers.

Several lists will help you to be on the same page: Roadmap, Backlog, Ready, In Progress, Verify, Done.

Tools: *GitHub*

Make it right by following:

• Delivery Flow for Distributed Remote Teams

• Manage priorities and visualize progress with a lightweight process

• What is a Kanban Board?

Share Roadmap — to build only what matters

Before starting working on a schedule, developers need to understand where they are going to be and what result is expected. Roadmap is a great tool to share vision and strategy.

Put Roadmap in front of developers. We found a Hierarchical Kanban Board Structure very handy to store Roadmap.

To build Roadmap we ask questions like: where will you be in 3 weeks, 3 months, and 3 years?

Tools: *GitHub*

Do not forget to check:

• The 666 roadmap

Schedule Rapid Delivers — to get small wins

Achieve a long-term goal is great — but this is a relatively rare thing to happen.

The good news is that even small wins can boost inner work life tremendously.

We split our work into 2 days size atomic units. This prevents bottlenecks and gets the working process much faster.

Tools: CircleCI

Learn more:

• The Power of Small Wins

Organize Regular Check-In — for engagement

Working without appreciations will make you a soulless machine. It’s killing all the fun.

On check-ins, you can organize retrospectives and provide feedback to the team. Agile Retrospective is a good practice to run experiments.

Regular check-in is a good opportunity to select what is the matter now. It is making everyone feel included as a team.

Tools: Hangouts

Hey, have you checked this:

• Atlassian’s Team Play: Retrospective

Synopsis

In the post we covered such techniques:

• Asynchronous Daily Text Stand-ups

• Kanban Board

• Roadmap

• Deliver By Small Chunks

• Monthly Retrospectives & Regular Feedback

Paul Keen is an Open Source Contributor and a Chief Technology Officer at JetThoughts. Follow him on LinkedIn or GitHub.

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