A Group of Geographically Distributed Staff is NOT a Scrum Team

It’s my opinion, and I think the opinion of the authors of Scrum, that a Scrum team must be collocated. A collection of geographically distributed staff is NOT a Scrum team.

If you work in a “distributed team”, please consider the following question.

Do the members of this group have authority to decide (if they wanted to) to relocate and work in the same physical space?

• If you answer “Yes” with regard to your coworkers: then I’d encourage you to advise your colleagues toward collocating, even if only as an experiment for a few Sprints, so they can decide for themselves whether to remain remote.
• If you answer “No”, the members do not have authority to decide to relocate:
  • then clearly it is not a self-organizing team;
  • clearly there are others in the organization telling those members how to perform their work;
  • and clearly they have dependencies upon others who hold authority (probably budgets as well) which have imposed constraints upon communication between team members.
  • CLEARLY, THEREFORE, IT IS NOT A SCRUM TEAM.

by David Sabine

If you find this useful, please consider contributing with our
“Value for Value” model.