How we combined virtual coaching and local coaching to kickstart a multi-continent, round the clock team of teams

Multi-continent teams caught in a spiral of ever-growing support effort

• 4 teams across South East Asia and South America answering IT backend demand from various business lines 24/7
• A no barrier policy for answering demands led to excellent support ratings but increasingly harder to sustain as demand grows
• IT teams needs to step up as a force of innovation as a technological disruption is foreseen to hit the business within 5 years
• Agile practices are to be experimented
• To make space for a product strategy balancing between support and value-adding development
• To increase team development efficiency
• The teammates have never worked in Agile nor been trained
• 12H time zone difference renders every synchronisation a challenge

Our approach – coach the teams as a SAFe Agile Release Train led by a virtual Program team

• Worked with a pair coach based in South America

1. Onboard teams in Agile at each location with intense 2 weeks coaching

• Agile training & Agile Roles coaching
• Team coaching (values, vision, roles)
• Fast paced Agile iterations for accelerated learning
• Alternate trainings as needed through coachings for maximum learning

2. Adapt Program rituals and artefacts to realities of across-the-globe communications: time zones, culture, alignment

• define synchronisation points in a minimalistic manner
• define protocols and artefacts templates to help team align on wordings
• Experiment about effective coaches synchronisation

3. Virtually coach a distributed SAFe Program team across 3 continents

• Online team training and coaching
• Remote meeting facilitation experiments
• Relayed with face to face coaching at each location
• In coordination with US Agile supervision entity

After early struggles on team synchronisation, the teams rose to a force of innovation for the organisation within 3 months

• Teams fully autonomous in Agile, building their own custom practices after 3 month
• Program Team found its footing and took the lead of its own SAFe experiment within 3 weeks
• New profiles have emerged as Product Owner with a fresh sense of leadership
• Team has started challenging and proposing business users to help them better
• Learnings have help reshaped coaching approach for upcoming Agile Program transformation on other business branches
• Product Owners and Program Team have become valued mentors for other programs

Tags: Agile Transformation, Coaching, distributed, pair coaching, Release Train, remote coaching, SAFe, virtual coaching