[Video] Looking for remote Agile tools? Think remote supplies instead

Since the pandemic, I feel that the focus on tools instead of practices has been on overdrive.

It was a common rant already in the Agile community to talk about people thinking that going Agile was about rolling out some Agile management tools. How many times did I hear “We’re deploying Jira Agile and training everyone to it. Max budget, we’re on top of it”.

Then people start taking the tool as a method guideline, using everything just because it’s available: Kanban and Scrum Board at the same time ; Story points and Man.Hours. Wait, Man.Hours in a scrum team? Yeah, some Agile softwares provide very questionable options in regard of the Agile principles.

The frustrating part is that we know that some fellow Agile coach will some day be brought in to clean up the mess, and it’s much harder to undo some practices that have settled than to just set things right in the first place.

The most frustrating to me: seeing electronic canvas used to run rituals while missing out completely on the whole facilitation aspect, like a retrospective where one manager was just pulling answers from the team and filling the canvas on his own, without even setting the stage first.

Ok, that used to be an among-ourselves Agile practitioner rant, but the question of tools is very relevant now. Since the pandemic, our dependency to remote collaboration tools is real, and remote work is not going away.

If you’re wondering why and how to pick your tools, check out this video.

Tags: Agile Facilitator, Agile rituals, Facilitation, Facilitation Distante, remote coaching, Remote facilitation, ritual