Co-location: it’s not you, it’s me. Coping with the realities of global teams.

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What does the future hold for distributed teams? As more companies embrace the appeal of ‘no office’ as well as the lure of reduced technical labor costs, how will this affect the ability to deliver value? Can new collaborative tools and nearly limitless bandwidth and storage make products easier or harder to produce with high quality? Can you envision the team of the future? Can you imagine a time where organizations focus solely on assembling the right mix of talent from anywhere in the world – and even consider physical co-location to be quaint and unnecessary?

The success of distributed agile teams relies heavily on ability to maintain a cooperative atmosphere in an environment where members are widely dispersed both geographically and temporally. Managing a backlog is difficult enough with a co-located team – introducing time zones, geographic location, cultural mismatches and language barriers can contribute quickly to manifestation of organizational anti-patterns. Thoughtful and forward-thinking practices can minimize avoidable failures and maintain member enthusiasm.

Gary and Mitch will offer real-world insight and experience (as well as display their battle scars) to share ideas and strategies the people who will make up the teams of the future. They will discuss maintaining and enhancing agile and lean foundational principles by the use of the latest distributed technologies. Proxification, which empowers distributed teams to manage and organize independently, is a key concept to allow for tight coordination of business and operational activities, and prevent bottlenecks from impairing delivery of value. The talk aims to demystify and embrace proxies, which many organizations are hesitant to employ, to help unlock the intrinsic value of knowledge workers across the globe.

The talk intends to persuade attendees that agile and lean principles apply at all levels of scale, from small scrum and kanban teams to large scale organizations with sophisticated DevOps practices, and that these practices will ensure continued innovation and adaptability to global value streams.