My new agile adventure in Vietnam Part 2

Part 1 <-> Part 3

I had the main ideas on how to put in place the IT's in this new company. Who will not jump on the occasion to put in place all he always wanted to see.

Some of you may ask why I decided to have my teams in Vietnam, why not somewhere more near Europe, like Eastern Europe or some Latin countries. The first time I came in Vietnam, I was invited by the Agile Vietnam Community to present subjects for the HCMC Agile Tour 2012. I had so much great moment. I talk with foreigners and Vietnam people. I loved the Vietnam culture and the most important one I meet a company with a business model as I like. The CEO believes in Agile and he his one of the major agile promotion company. They give free training to the University in two big cities. They are mostly the main Sponsor on all the Agile / Lean event. It's easy all their customers need to work with Scrum. The customer brings the Product Owner, they bring the team and the Scrum Master.

As a Product Owner you don't have just a team of project and that's it. As a Product Owner it's your team, you participate with them at all the team building, you part of the team. You are not someone, a stranger.

Before leaving for Vietnam, I needed to put in place diverse remote tools to promote communication between the teams and me. As a Product Owner I need to be near the team, even if we have thousand kilometers between us and the time zone.  I decided to put some tools I like and I used for many years and also because their business model was interesting for small teams :

• JIRA + Agile JIRA: To follow the Epics and Stories
• Confluence: The wiki
• Bitbucket: the GIT Server
• Crucible: the review tool, a must if you want to participate with the team in the review of the code

Within JIRA I create different project :

• Program Management: A Kanban board, I follow the Epics, from their open, confirmed, selected, in progress, In Review, Ready to Release, Close
• Beagle Scrum Team: A Scrum Board for the Beagle team, only Epics in Progress, In Review appear here.

So here we are, ready to leave for the Vietnam...

Before leaving, I had a first Sprint in remote. I still remember that first day. I was so exited and in the same time anxious. My wife pushes me out of the bed, I could not sleep. It was my first true experience as Product Owner with a team in Vietnam.

6:00 am

That's it, GotoMeeting is on, I hear some sound in the back, I think they are like me. Who will be the PO, he is cool ? How the team will be ? 

After some time of thinking and knowing the team better, I found out that they join the best people for my team. They know I am an Agile Coach, I was an XP Programmer.

The rest of the time I presented the vision of the Product as much I can, it is true I didn't know as much I know now. I present the Epics and the User Story I think they will work on the first Sprint. 

I put also a technical task: put in place the commit stage in the continuous delivery.

To continue...