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.