Agile in the Time of Coronavirus

As the novel coronavirus continues its world tour, the WHO has declared it to be a pandemic. What can we do to slow its spread and flatten the disease curve? The two most important measures we can all take are to improve our hand hygiene, and to increase social distance. Go and wash your hands right now. Or reach for some hand sanitizer, which should be on every desk. And stop touching your face! That’s a hard habit to break, so keep your hands clean, keep track of when you touch shared objects like door handles, whiteboard markers, touch panels and all the myriad things you touch every day. If it’s a shared object, wash your hands or sanitize before you let your filthy fingers wander to your moist, delicious, virus-friendly face.

The single best way to increase social distance is to work from home, and we’ll talk about that in my next post. If, for some bizarre reason, you are still gathering in an office every day, there are some things you absolutely should do to slow the now-inevitable spread of the disease.

Look at your ceremonies and gatherings and consider your tools and artefacts. Do you have a physical wall with lovely, tactile cards blu-tacked on it? Physical walls are in every way superior to a virtual one, and our viral foe agrees. The little beast can hang around happily on a card for several days, waiting to pounce on the next person to touch it.

Lose the physical wall. The best way to do this is to declare it defunct and leave it in place as a memory of happier times. Taking it down, recycling the gooey, gummy blu-tack, and declaring a job well done seems like a good idea, but you’ve just exposed yourself to the most fingered objects in your workspace. Instead, simply announce that we’re going full virtual, and no-one is to interact with your vertical viral hothouse.

Do you have a daily stand-up? A time when you get everyone together, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, passing round muffins and cookies? Even better, do you have a speaking token, a festering object of corruption that you pass faithfully from hand to diseased hand every day? If you do, stop using it. Remove it from the workspace with tongs. Now wash your hands with soap.

There is no reason for stand-up to take place in a common physical location. Social distancing means just that – keep your distance. Move your stand-ups online.

Iteration planning and retrospectives are crucial events for a high-performing team. Do you all get into a meeting room, pass the cookies around one more time, then interact with physical artefacts like cards, marker pens, whiteboards, planning poker cards and suchlike? Yep, move those shenanigans online too. Lives depend on it.

Showcases are a great way to celebrate your successes by sharing your progress and viruses as widely as possible! Sharing is caring, so why not infect your customers, leaders, and any waifs and strays you can round up? Again, there is no need to do them in the same physical space.

Do you do pair programming? Two people sitting at one workstation sharing a keyboard, a mouse, and any passing pathogen? Tools are out there to virtualise this, too. If you don’t have them in place yet, start by googling ‘remote pair programming.’ Make it happen, especially if you make people change pairing partners frequently.

Once you’ve moved your wall, stand-ups, planning, retros, and showcases online, nixed physical pairing, drenched your workspace in 70% alcohol and benzalkonium, it’s time to ask: why are we still coming to the office on crowded public transport, caressing doorknobs and access panels, and generally acting as though we’re immune to mutating coronaviruses?

The simple answer is that now is the time to move to remote working, and that brings its own challenges which I’ll help you overcome next time.

Stay safe and wash your filthy hands!