Recently I had an opportunity to facilitate a discussion about working in distributed teams. Community of practice in the company I work for organized this meeting. I used to work in distributed teams and currently I work in such a team too. The topic is crucial and interesting to me. I would like to share some thoughts here about it.
According to The Scrum Guide™, “The Scrum Master is a servant-leader for the Scrum Team”[1]. There are many articles on the servant meaning in the Scrum Master role. In theory leader does not have to be servant. Traditional leader is not servant [2]. The purpose here is to take a short look on these leader-related terms and realize how they are tend to be understood on a daily basis. Today the meaning of a leader goes towards the servant role. There is a common understanding of being to serve others rather than giving commands. It is not addressed only to Scrum Masters, this role is only an example.
POC stands for Proof Of Concept. Even though the title says about agile projects, POC are performed in other environments as well. I feel more confident considering them in the agile area. Certain forms of POC are a must regardless of methodology. It is almost not possible to build complex solution with no research. Some projects have an opportunity to use lessons learned from others. POC are less or more expensive. They are the initial investment to research feasibility before running a project. This post focuses mainly on POCs in software development projects in agile environments.