I’ve been researching Scrum lately by tapping my gracious and experienced friends for interviews. One pitfall I’ve heard a few times concerns the struggle to maintain cohesion and flow with contributors who work remotely. This seems like a big problem for Scrum if it requires teams be present physically in the same room to accomplish true synergy. Frankly, restricting the pool of talent to a geographical circle seems like a difficult local optimization and not one I believe product owners would choose just for the sake of Scrum.
This post is about one possible solution.
Last week I visited Mike Landau at SetFocus in Parsippany, NJ. SetFocus helps smart IT people retool to get better jobs. They do this with a catalog of intensive multi-week training courses, offering both full and part time options. Mike showed me classes being delivered over a private video conference system called The Grid. Instructors and students dial in for each class. The displays had a Brady Bunch, nine box look. So far, nothing exotic, this is a well worn path for delivering one to many lecture. Gosh, I even remember Professor Tony Spiva delivering Econ lectures to my UT dorm TV back in the way back.
But here’s what I saw next.
As our conversation evolved over the two days, Jonathan Lefkowitz, SetFocus President, quickly and easily called adhoc meetings with his staff over The Grid. For instace, with an instant message: “James, can you meet us on channel 88?”, and a few clicks on the remote control to channel 88. Boom, there’s James, in Florida, ready for 20 minutes of high bandwidth face to face conversation.
While I was touring the operations desk, Mike showed me another feature that turned my head. Students can grab a channel, called a ” lounge”, to use for adhoc collaboration after class.
So I’m in New Jersey witnessing SetFocus staff from all over the country use video conference like they’re George Jetson. Students are using it for all form of adhoc collaboration with classmates – like pair programming.
Now, I did time at Microsoft where we had a time-killer technology called LiveMeeting, a Windows desktop application like WebEx. It has a ton of features like pushing an update to you just as your meeting is about to start, and never quite synchronizing all the various projector, laptop, and video stream resolutions. Every meeting that depends on a LiveMeeting (read collaboration with WW partners) spends the first 10 minutes in “AV fiddle time.” Never a good start when the goal is high bandwidth, positive, communication. The meeting begins with everyone annoyed.
So what’s the difference?
Modality.
The interface for The SetFocus Grid is delivered to a TV set, not a PC window. You recycle an old CRT TV for the display. On top of the TV is a Polycom v500 video conference device providing video capture, CODEC, and output for high quality voice and video signal over the public IP network. You don’t need a dedicated circuit like my old Dr. Spiva days. And here’s the trick: uncoupling the PC from the video device puts each on equal footing on your desktop. It actually feels like the human to human interface has higher priority. You’re not navigating a cluttered Windows desktop where your view of a colleague is competing with your development environment, email client, and Firefox tabs.
A dedicated video solution is one possible path to improve day to day collaboration of Scrum teams with remote contributors. A modest investment widens the circle of talent you can include and reenforces the first tenet of the Agile Manifesto: “Individuals and interactions over processes and tools”.
And in extreme form, working remotely like this, it’s pretty green too.
Comments invited.
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