Great teams need great talent and great talent doesn’t alway live down the street. So you go off, assemble your distributed agile teams and keep on creating great products. Your product guy may live in Canada with a UX lean in Paris and developers in Brazil. You’re winning.
Time zones are needed for your distributed agile teams
You start creating iterations and realize that you’re not sure when your iteration starts? Is that Monday in East Canada or Paris? When do you update your burndown chart? How many hours ago did John update that story?
Many tools don’t have support for distributed agile teams with people in different locations. You’re stuck trying to do time zone arithmetic in your head or resorting to some sort of time zone meeting scheduler. It works, but it kinda sucks.
At Agile Bench we’re a distributed agile team too. We have team members in East Australia, Poland and the US West Coast. We were getting frustrated that dates and times were always being shown in one timezone. When we started Agile Bench it seemed like a good starting point, but we’ve outgrown a single time zone mindset and we’re guessing you probably have too.
To make Agile Bench as worldly as your team we’ve introduced time zones. Your project can now live within a time zone. The project’s time zone is used to determine when an iterations starts and ends, plus are we use them when generating burndown charts. You can update your Project’s time zone from the Project’s Settings page.
Users also can set their time zones. This way user’s see all the changes in their time zone. You can update your time zone from your User Settings page.
Happy Time Travelling
About Mark Mansour
Mark is the Founder of Agile Bench. Mark has distilled 15 years of experience delivering software projects into Agile Bench to make your life easier.