Abstract:A fundamental agile principle is the team reflects at regular intervals how to become more effective. The SAFe Inspect and Adapt Problem Solving workshop is a wonderful opportunity for everyone on an Agile Release Train (ART) to reflect on becoming more effective. However, what happens when the ART teams are massively distributed, such that the Sun truly never sets on the ART? How do you provide everyone on the ART an opportunity to reflect and collaborate with others who have similar interests? How do you enable all to participate in the problem solving session, to raise and solve problems that are important to them, and not just the problems that are important and visible to "home base"? This is the situation we faced at a large multi-national petroleum company preparing to conduct their first SAFe problem solving workshop. This story describes the practices, the agenda, the tools, and the lessons learned from running an equitable problem solving workshop for a train on which the Sun never set.
Lessons Learned from Your Experience:- An agenda for conducting a globally distributed problem solving workshop that creates equal opportunity for all voices to be heard.
- People do not mind staying up late to solve a problem if the problem is of interest to them and they have the option to participate or not to participate.
- The problem causing the teams the most pain are often not what management thinks are the problems causing the most pain
- Managing the logistics of a globally distributed workshop are easily an order of magnitude more time consuming and complex than running a local face to face workshop
- Even primitive collaboration tools can help you run a distributed problem solving workshop
- People require additional training ahead of time to run an effective distributed problem solving workshop
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