during the scheduled conference call, the team demonstrates stories done during first week of the iteration to John and Sean. John and Sean point out few defects and minor changes during the demonstration, for which Deepak creates tasks on Scrumy. After the demonstration a short retrospective meeting is held where team discusses issues faced and the changes that should be brought in to resolve those issues.
Issues
On Monday, the first day of second iteration, John, in his office, is impatiently waiting for Deepak to come online on Skype as he wants to discuss an important change in some use-case which has been just discussed with the sales team; hence approved by the board. Teams in offshore delivery model often have to face this issue of time management where the one team is dying to speak to the other team but it can't happen just because when one team is in its office the other team is in its bed.
After waiting for couple of hours and without realizing the time zone difference John gives a call to Deepak on his cell phone. It is just thirty minutes to midnight in India and Deepak is having a good sleep after a tiring day at work. Deepak picks up his cell phone and just asks John "politely" to discuss all this with him tomorrow morning his time. John didn't like Deepak's approach and drops an email to Pankaj asking to end the contract as he is finding it hard to communicate with the offshore team in case of urgency.
At 12:30 in night Pankaj's Blackberry wakes him up, he reads John's email and gives him a call on his cell-phone. After discussing what happened, Pankaj assures John of some solution and arranges a meeting with him early morning, where the matter will be discussed with Deepak and a viable solution will be derived.
Deepak receives a call from Pankaj early morning at 6:00 am where Pankaj discusses with him what happened last night and asks him to be on Skype meeting at 7:30 am with John.
A protocol is proposed which offers a solution to most of the pain points both the teams had discussed in the meeting:
1) In case of an urgency Deepak and John must be approachable from 6 in the morning till 12 midnight by viable means of communication.
2) If there is any requirement change during an iteration, which might effect current iteration, then it must be addressed in an urgent meeting, and the current iteration must be frozen or current iteration must be modified to address this urgent change. Also, both product and iteration backlogs must be updated.
3) Deepak must overlap 2 working hours with John, and stay online on Skype.
4) Deepak must send a weekly report to John on:
1. What was done this week.
2. What will be done next week.
3. Any issues which might effect team's velocity and product's burndown.
On Tuesday morning, after the meeting with John and Pankaj, Deepak asks the team to study requirement changes and to come up with estimates. Fortunately, in couple of hours the team gives an estimate of 10 story points to do requirement changes. Deepak updates Scrumy with new stories and related tasks, drops an email to John to prioritize these new tasks and to suspend those current tasks he feels not important to this iteration, and asks the team to keep on working on current tasks while he waits for John to update Scrumy. By Deepak's Tuesday evening John prioritizes the new tasks, and calls Deepak on his cell-phone to
About the author
The opinions and positions expressed within these guest posts are those of the author alone and do not represent those of the TechWell Community Sites. Guest authors represent that they have the right to distribute this content and that such content is not violating the legal rights of others. If you would like to contribute content to a TechWell Community Site, email editors@techwell.com.
