Proximity Over Distance by Jutta Eckstein

Jutta a partner of IT communication, is an independent consultant and trainer from Braunschweig, Germany. Her know-how in agile processes is based on over ten years experience in developing object-oriented applications. She has helped many teams and organizations all over the world to make the transition to an agile approach. She has a unique experience in applying agile processes within medium-sized to large distributed mission-critical projects.

This is also the topic of her already published book ‘Agile Software Development in the Large’ and of the one she’s currently writing on ‘Distributed Agile Software Development’. Besides engineering software Jutta has been designing and teaching OT courses in industry. Having completed a course of teacher training and led many ‘train the trainer’ programs in industry, she focuses also on techniques which help teach OT and is a main lead in the pedagogical patterns project. She has presented work in her main areas at ACCU (UK), JAOO (Denmark), OOPSLA (USA), SD West, SD Best Practices (both USA), XP (Europe) and Agile (USA).

The talk “Creating Proximity over a Distance”.

The Agile Manifesto asks for face-to-face communication, trust and close collaboration. But widely accepted wisdom is that trust needs touch. So how can you create this proximity over a distance?

You can bridge the distance using virtual communication channels wisely and by travelling – at least from time to time. Yet, even with these answers at hand it is important to make the travel beneficial and to know which virtual communication tools are helpful for what kinds of situation.

Another challenge global teams are facing, is overcoming cultural differences. Yet, these differences have their origin not only in geography and language, but also in strategies, politics, values and history. A company, no less than the broader society, shapes a culture that influences its employees’ behavior. A distributed team needs to leverage this and jointly develop a project culture and keep the project history alive for emphasizing the common culture.

In this session, Jutta will share her experiences in overcoming distances in distributed projects. Her experiences are mainly based on large global agile projects developing embedded or commercial software.