Archive for the ‘Toolkit’ Category
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Of Tools and Chasms
There are a dazzling array of agile project management tools out there, with new ones being added every day. More and more of them are targeted at geographically dispersed teams, claiming to increase productivity, enhance communication, and improve our insight into the state of the project. The hidden cost of these tools, however, can be complexity. I asked David J. Bland, an Agile coach and a speaker on distributed agile project management, to write about the pitfalls of complexity, and the virtue of using simple tools in a dispersed agile software development team. So your enterprise organization has decided to adopt agile. Everyone on your team received a two day training course, a subscription to safari books online and a login for the spiffy new Agile Project Management (APM) tool. Now go forth with
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Screencast: Cardmeeting
One of the simplest, most versatile tools for meetings is the good ole’ stack of index cards. Is it possible to recreate the experience of pushing 3×5 cards around on the table in a virtual meeting? In this video I demonstrate a free tool that does a pretty good job of it. Sometimes the simple tools are the most useful. Cardmeeting is a tool that enables members of a dispersed team to collaboratively move virtual index cards around on a virtual table top. Best of all, it’s completely free! Check out this video for a quick demonstration
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Screenshare-palooza
The ability to share your screen with a remote team member is an essential piece of the remote collaboration toolkit. When it comes to screensharing software, there is a dazzling, sometimes baffling array of options. Here are a few I know of. Skype has built-in screensharing. It is currently display-only, but it works across all platforms. They appear to be using the same video compression technology for it as they do for their video chat, which means that while the picture can be a bit blurry, it copes well with temporary network slowdowns. Good old VNC is still one of the most robust and cross-platform solutions for sharing desktop control. There are multiple VNC clients and servers for every OS, both free and paid. DimDim, Yugma, YuuGuu are all launchable from the web, all have names that
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Screencast: Flowdock Test Drive
Flowdock is a web-based hosted text chat application, along same lines as Campfire or Talker. Flowdock has some unique features which set it apart from those tools, which I demonstrate in this video
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The Remote Toolkit: Google Drawings (screencast)
A quick walkthrough of the basic features of the new Google Drawing app, with a focus on remote collaboration features. Photo credit: Fran Pregernik
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Remote Toolkit: MindMeister (Screencast)
A short screencast demoing one of my favorite remote team collaboration tools: MindMeister. In it, I demonstrate how mind maps can be built collaboratively by multiple users, and talk a little about how this can be useful in remote meetings
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Four Essential Collaboration Tools
In talking to members of distributed software teams, four tools stand out as being nearly ubiquitous. Other tools may supplement them, but these four have become the de facto core of the remote collaboration tool set
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The Wide Teams Podcast
A weekly podcast featuring interviews with people who are making dispersed teams work day by day.
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