Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege to work in several environments where we used web-‐based project tools in unusual ways. Here are some stories of co-‐located teams using tools made for distributed teams. Multi-site teams have a tendency to form an us-and-them attitude to the other sites.
Their customers include major players in healthcare, and entertainment. They had a need for quick and easy-‐to-‐use repository for conversations and random pieces of team information. We found a lot of unexpected value with the Google social networking tools, specifically Google Hangouts. That said, I do talk to a lot of teams, and those conversations have led me to some tentative opinions that I’ll share here.
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While a co-located model enables you to evaluate whether employees meet these qualities all the time, it may be difficult to do the same with distributed teams, thanks to distance barriers. If you are not in a position to adopt technologies or strategies that bridge this virtual gap, engaging a model that you can directly control sounds like the best option. On the other hand, distributed teams are optimal for organizations that want to scale in terms of production or market reach, as they are an avenue to overseas job and consumer markets. This model allows you to hire expert talents at relatively affordable rates and save the costs of office space. That way, you get extra money in your budget to drive innovation and product development.
- It’s that feeling when you are coming to work because you are looking forward to meeting people that you know, respect and like, to work together on some cool new goal.
- Pushing the team to bring most communication onto digital tools, whether chat, longer-form interactions like Jotto, video-conferencing, shared documents, etc. will make this easier.
- Trust is easier to build in person, even if the co-location is limited to a week or two.
- This engagement model is popular thanks to its numerous benefits that some businesses have found to outweigh the drawbacks.
However, success doesn’t happen without the proper framework for remote teams or teams working in one location. Both solutions have specific requirements that you need to consider. In this article, you will build team culture find a selection of useful aspects to set the stage for high-performing co-located teams. Frankly, if you don’t take care of these essential aspects, you risk failing to take advantage of co-located teams.
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Well, when i worked with a co located agile team and a distributed agile team, the results were different. Going with Jurgen and Anthony Mersino, and yes even the team was distributed the mental proximity was strong and hence better results. So its all mental proximity for delivering the good results and not the distance. Themost recent VersionOne survey had 82% of respondents saying they had some teams using agile in a distributed fashion. That doesn’t mean 82% of teams are distributed, but 82% of respondents had at least some distributed agile teams.
It conveys the latest information at a glance, similar to a team Dashboard. 3) a face-to-face kickoff meeting is helpful since it is much easier to email, call, or instant message someone you’ve met in person. Team members may be working at different times in different time zones, so more coordination of work will be required. On a co-located team, all team members are located in a common work area within approximately 35 feet of each other. This allows the team to rely on face-to-face communication and enables two other forms of information sharing.
Incremental Design
We had a local team, and I felt as a part of it, but almost all of us were working on different international projects. It can be that I perceive it totally different from the majority of people. Or, articles on the internet are written by people working in companies who have stakes in remote work. Like those, whose interest is to sell products for remote collaboration, like Jira. Or companies like Buffer that are completely remote and they would like to assure potential Buffer candidates that it’s a great model, to attract talent.
Other factors still intrude, particularly since changes in team distribution often mean people will leave or join a team, but I think this yields stronger evidence than comparing totally different teams. Some of the loudest are startups such as Etsy, Basecamp, and Github, many of whose employees have never worked in an office together. For such teams, remote work is the future, those who push against it are on the losing side of history. One of the most profound consequences of the information age is the ability to do so many things while ignoring location.
Company
The first thing to get straight is that there isn’t a simple dichotomy between co-located and remote teams. There’s many different varieties, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. If you’re going to have employees based in different offices or areas, you must invest in communication equipment that fits the job, including software for laptops and communication networks. Don’t rely on freeware resources until you test them out first.
Work tasks can flow, and if they can’t flow across engineers, there’s still progress being made more frequently. If sharing story work is too awkward, then stories can be assigned in such a way that more stories can be worked on simultaneously. Plan on equipping conference rooms in the main offices with communication equipment like SMART boards and monitors.
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Dispersed teams may need support to ensure that they commit to projects that are really more likely to succeed. Such conversations may also make team members more open to the fact that the project can fail and therefore leave them more ready to abandon failing projects. Going back to Deep Work, Newport does push for individual isolation for productivity. However, he also recognizes the value of serendipitous meetings and collaboration. He cites the ability to interact with another to co-create, particularly at whiteboards, that sounded very much like what we expect from agile teams.
While either structure (co-located or distributed) can be effective, both types of teams need to be designed and led with intention. We had to be, given our distributed group and the fact that we were working on the single most important product for the company. We made it work and were incredibly successful in developing and launching a brand new product .
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With intentional leadership and design, we can create high performing distributed teams. As we’ve seen from the research and the examples above, the limiting factors to remote work are often in the effort put in rather https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ than inherent in the nature of the team. In order to be successful, forming and maintaining a remote or distributed team needs to be intentional, as some of the keys to success are different than co-located teams.
