In my new environment, we’re growing so fast that space is becoming an issue very quickly. We now have resources spread between two offices in different cities (luckily within 10 minutes of each other, though). We’re also considering our options on hiring some coding facilities in Canada or elsewhere for support work, though we have no plans for overseas yet. Due to space constraints, we have also talked about letting folks work from home part of the time.
Still, in a fully agile environment this poses some difficult challenges. The agile culture has emphasized team co-location and face-to-face interactions heavily as a best practice, but obviously in this scenario that’s not likely to be possible. This disrupts team interaction, project visibility, and a variety of other positive aspects of the agile methodology.
There is a never-ending plethora of tips for distributed agile teams, but obviously there is no one-size-fits-all solution. I’ve been brainstorming for a while, and over the next couple of weeks I’m going to try and prepare some solution proposals for the executives here. I’ll let you know what I discover.
If you have any suggestions of your own, feel free to share them.
posted on July 20th, 2010 at 8:40 am
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