Working remotely | Read the latest blogs, news and views from Infomentum.

How do you keep your retrospectives fresh and the team engaged? It is a challenge many agile teams face. As organisations adjust to running almost every meeting online, the issue of conference call fatigue is making this even more important. To run effective agile retrospectives in any climate you need an efficient delivery approach that will spur your team. Remote or face to face, it is essential to keep the retrospective short, focused and engaging - read on to find out how.

The last few months have been challenging for most Sales teams, and ours has been no exception. The uncertainty of the economic climate has led many businesses to hibernate. In the space of a couple of weeks, the market went quiet; projects were put on hold, budgets cut.

The weeks preceding the lockdown were tense. As a CTO at Infomentum, I am responsible not only for the internal IT but also for providing our customers with reliable and efficient co-managed services. My team had many ongoing projects, customers on 24/7 support contracts, and, on top of it, manage our transition to remote working to take care of. This was no easy task, but I was determined, there was no way we were going to let anyone down!

In our previous blogs, we described the transition to running projects remotely, explained the adjustments we made to keep effective communication with our distributed team and dived deep into practicalities of remote Agile Sprint Planning. We initially thought of dedicating this blog to remote agile stand-ups but in the end, decided to change the focus slightly. At times when 35-40% of adults in the UK have reported concerns about their mental health, and every second person worries about his/her wellbeing, it's crucial to support our employees. So, what exactly can be done? When it comes to staff emotional health, we believe there is no 'fits all' solution; it is a combination of small adjustments that can be weaved into every meeting or team interaction.

According to the 6th principle of the Agile Manifesto: "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation." So, does it mean that managing agile projects in the new world of large-scale remote working is impossible? Our answer is no! In the previous blog, we talked about how we ensure efficient communication with the home-based teams. In this blog, we discuss the important adjustments we’ve made to our remote Sprint Planning meetings as part of our Agile project delivery.

The quality of communication within a project team is often the most important aspect in the successful delivery of any project. Since our switch to remote working at the start of the pandemic, we’ve been faced with the challenge of using our project management tools in different ways to ensure that the quality of our communication and collaboration doesn’t suffer.

COVID-19 has turned our lives upside down. Just a few weeks ago, companies had to quickly transition all employees to work remotely. As businesses and people are gradually adjusting to the new circumstances and realising the benefits of working from home, many predict that this operation model is here to stay far beyond the crisis.