After the COVID-19 breakout, agile teams found themselves in situations that "pure agilists" and textbooks on agile methods had preferred to ignore. While an agile mindset helped them to quickly shift to remote work, a mere virtualization of agile practices often proved insufficient, and several challenges emerged. This paper reports on an Action Research project carried out in Lufthansa Systems Poland with the aim of (1) revisiting their ad-hoc actions to adapt to remote work, and (2) elaborating systematic solutions to maintain efficiency in such a setting. With our assistance, the participating teams found measures to mitigate issues posed by the new work environment. They devised an inter-team communication model to improve the effectiveness of information exchange, which had declined in the absence of spontaneous, face-to-face communication. Additionally, they implemented several other mitigation strategies, including working at least one day per week in the office, keeping webcams on during online meetings, and summarizing meetings at the end. Overall, our study supports previous findings indicating that Scrum can be effectively applied beyond its comfort zone, but also suggests that for adaptations to be successful and comprehensive, they should be developed in a structured manner.
Piet Heinkade 179
Amsterdam 1019 HC
Netherlands
Method Tailoring
Agile Software Development
Adaptation
Teamwork
Collaboration