Experiments for Remote Teams

As you might know I am a fan of Management 3.0 and especially the celebration grid. The main idea is to do experiments to find out what’s working and what’s not. So when the pandemic started and our team went into full remote we did some experiments.

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First minutes of Daily dedicated to chit chat

Due to the remote situation there was no more coffee shop talk. We tried to compensate by dedicating the first minutes of our daily standup to some trivia: Are there new Netflix series? Is there some cool new music out there? What games do you play? When is KarLito_DE going to do his next twitch stream? Is there a new article on Peter’s homepage? Every team member had some news to share!

Coffee Corner Chat group

Starting with Skype for business and now in MS Teams we’ve added a chat group for our team to exchange private and work related topics with the whole team. From serious technical question to cat gifs and dad jokes anything can be shared. Update: After the last retrospective we’ve splitted the groups into “Coffee Croner” and “Tech Corner” to better separate technical questions from chit chat.

Shared Spotify playlist

KarLito_DE had the idea to create a playlist on Spotify to put on the newly discovered music and share it with the team.

Rule: Everyone was allowed to put up one track per day! When we finally meet again on our team event we use the playlist for background music during the BBQ. Update 2022: 576 Songs -> 24hours of music

Remote mob programming

Because our team works on different quite disjoint projects we introduced Mob Programming. We gathered for one hour per week to try something new. Our first project evolved around using HMTL, CSS / Bootstrap and JavaScript, the second project was a command line application in Kotlin. We are currently working on an Android App to learn more about Kotlin, Gradle and libraries like Room. The main goal is to create something useful aka “scratch your own itch”. Update: We dropped the Android app because there wasn’t that much interest in the topic anymore. (Inspect and Adapt) We started to work on a Python package to wrap the Artifactory API.