Scrum between UK and Australia - is it possible?

Highlander,

Seeing the inefficiencies caused by traditional collaboration tools working on development projects across time zones inspired me to create www.timzon.com.

It's a video collaboration solution that allows remote teams to communicate through recorded conversations. With functionality like white boarding to enhance the communication the idea is to create a face-to-face like experience but on your own time.

I would be really interested to get your feedback whether TimZon can help you with your time zone challenge.

Regards,
Jerome.

Communicate early, often, and in a way that does not completely derail the ongoing development activities. Synchronizing your distributed version control repositories as often as possible will help, I agree, but you have to have a constant flow of communication to bridge the gap across the globe.

Something that I have found to get in the way - there are sometimes too many ways to communicate. Should it be e-mail, discussion forums, wiki's, phone, video, etc? The list is already too large, and everyone can't monitor all of them.

My advice: pick 2 and ban the rest. I'd choose daily phone or video conference calls, and discussion forums. E-mail gets lost. Individual phone calls are not coordinated enough. The ongoing discussion needs to happen in a place that is recorded, open and visible to all. By limiting the mechanisms of communication, but encouraging your teams to communicate as much as possible, you'll get the best bandwidth and everyone will always know where to go to keep up with the conversation.

Good luck!

Sorry thought I'd rip off the title of the last two posts - but it really is that simple!!

You are working on opposite sides of the world on one project for a key client using Scrum.

You need to communicate that is obvious, but all that communication between teams and even the client should be over one system that will capture the full history of the discussion, which will aide productivity and efficiency. Moreover, having this communication stamped and dated will be important from both an auditory and relationship perspective in the delivery and maintenance stages of your work.

With the distances you are talking about the importance of, keeping to your scrum process is central, to create and maintain the positive experiences you have had with Scrum thus far. I'd advocate therefore looking at an ALM platform that is Wiki centric that can store all documents, emails, artifacts and covers task and resource management planning; but crucially can assure the Scrum Process. Ensuring that all members of the project team are meeting the requirements of the method, that resource and task planning is meeting your iterations and deliverables.

Going back to your 150 page spec document you need to be able to put this directly into an ALM platform that all members of the group can access and work towards.

Whilst the company I work for is a channel partner for Polarion in Australia there are a number of systems out there to help you, not just now but in the future with a real return to your bottom line.