Up until the pandemic, many people offered advice to agile teams who wanted to include remote people: “Don’t do that!” However, we’ve all been dispersed since March. And, many of us aren’t going “back” to work for months. Some companies aren’t even planning a return date—and some have given up their buildings. Remote is now a fact of life. That means the common advice, “Don’t do that!” doesn’t help distributed agile teams.

However, many distributed agile teams have problems using agile approaches—because those teams focus on practices. Instead, consider how you can apply the eight principles for your successful distributed team. Aside from the principles, you’ll learn the few metrics you need (not velocity!) and how you might optimize your remote team’s agility to deliver the outcomes your business needs.

Johanna Rothman, known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams do reasonable things that work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can then decide how to adapt their product development.

With her trademark practicality and humor, Johanna is the author of 18 books about many aspects of product development. She’s written these books:
• Modern Management Made Easy series
• Become a Successful Consultant: Advise, Influence, and Serve Clients for Mutual Profit
• Write a Conference Proposal the Conference Wants and Accepts
• From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams (with Mark Kilby)
• Create Your Successful Agile Project: Collaborate, Measure, Estimate, Deliver
• Agile and Lean Program Management: Scaling Collaboration Across the Organization
• Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects, 2nd edition
• Project Portfolio Tips: Twelve Ideas for Focusing on the Work You Need to Start & Finish
• Diving for Hidden Treasures: Finding the Value in Your Project Portfolio (with Jutta Eckstein)
• Predicting the Unpredictable: Pragmatic Approaches to Estimating Project Schedule or Cost
• Manage Your Job Search
• Hiring Geeks That Fit
• The 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management
• Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management (with Esther Derby)

In addition to articles and columns on various sites, Johanna writes the Managing Product Development blog on her web site, jrothman.com, as well as a personal blog on createadaptablelife.com.