Using Scrum With Offshore Team

Описание: Mark Layton (aka Mr. Agile) discusses scrum with offshore teams. Learn more about distributed teams or ask Mr. Agile a question at https://platinumedge.com/ask-mr-agile...

Transcription:
Q: Is it possible to use Scrum with an offshore team?
A: A lot of companies ask us if it’s possible to use scrum with an offshore team, and the answer is… yes, it’s possible. But it’s not advised. Let me tell you why.

You know if I have a co-located team and I have a question with one of my teammates, that exchange is very fast. We sit down, we have a couple minute conversation, maybe we draw something on the whiteboard. If that same exchange is happening with an offshore team, I now have to go back to my office, I compose them an email, I send it over to them. Well, if you’re talking about the U.S. the average U.S. business person gets 110 emails a day. Every day. So it’s not like they’re going to be opening my email immediately and respond to it. I have to work my way up to their queue. Now that I’ve worked my way up their queue, it’s possible we will have them understand every nuance of every question that I’ve asked. But occasionally they’re going to send questions back to me, and you know what? I have 110 emails that I have to get through before I get to their questions.

And so the delay every time there is an exchange back and forth between two people and trying to get on the same page with the offshore team, is much, much less efficient. Now I’m just talking about a distributed team in that scenario. If we’re talking about offshore, now we’ve got the situation in which I’m starting my day when you’re ending your day. You’re starting your day when I’m ending my day. I just took our two minute exchange and I turned it into two days, minimum.

Scrum is an exposure model. We can use it with co-located teams that tend to be very very effective. I can use it with distributed teams across five different continents. What scrum is going to expose to the organization is that having those lags is inefficient. That’s what it’s supposed to do.