Posts Tagged ‘collaboration’
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Wide Teams Podcast #20: Interview with Thomaz Leite
In this episode, a discussion with software developer Thomaz Leite, who lives in Missouri and collaborate with team members in Michigan, Portugal, and Brazli. He introduced me to an new Open Source VoiP tool that competes with Skype, and talked about doing pair programming with remote team members
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Conquering “The Fear”: 5 pointers for stress-free management of remote teams
Managing a dispersed team for the first time can be pretty scary. How will you know if everyone is doing their jobs and staying on schedule? Here are some tips that will have you breathing easy again. Here’s the situation: you’re leading a dispersed team for the first time. You’ve had a kickoff meetup so that everyone could meet face to face. You’ve assembled your collaboration tools. You’ve scheduled daily standup meeting at a time when everyone is available. But now the project has started, and you’re starting to get anxious. What is everyone doing right now? Are they working? Do they really understand their tasks? Are they on schedule? Are they being distracted by their families? Don’t look now, but you’ve got The Fear. It’s a creeping anxiety that affects many managers who have
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Wide Links #14
Another fresh serving of articles and presentations about remote work and distributed teams, from all around the web. In this edition: building trust, collaborating on visual design while distributed, keeping a team together during dry spells, and much more! Creative Remote Collaboration » IQ Blog – Annotated tags: wideteams Remote collaboration is important for any line of work where people are divided by time and space, but the need is expanded in a creative industry where there is an increased requirement of collaboration, communication, and execution of ideas. When you work for a creative agency with colleagues and clients around the country (and developers around the world), how can you improve and streamline the creative collaboration process? Building Trust Within Virtual Teams – Small Steps Add Up – Annotated One of the ideas
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Have a spam day! Making communication tools fun.
Picking a new team communication tool is one thing. Getting everyone to use it is another. Here’s a fun technique for easing adoption of a new tool. So you’ve evaluated the options and picked a chat tool for your distributed team. Or a presence app. Or maybe you’ve decided to use video mail. Now you have another challenge ahead of you: getting everyone to use it. Some people are natural early adopters. I’ll try any tool out if it’s new and interesting, and keep using it if I find it helpful. Others are slower to change. One way to get over that initial resistance to a new tool is to make a game of it. One one of the teams I work with, the engineering leadership decided to roll out Yammer for status updates and
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Meetings and Distributed Introverts
For an introvert, any meeting can be trying. In this guest article, contributor Chris Strom talks about how distributed meetings are especially taxing for those of an introverted bent, and some of his strategies for coping. I am a strong introvert. As with most introverts, I lose energy when I interact with people. Meetings, in particular, drain me. Since they are a staple of a professional career, I have built up something of a tolerance for meetings. Remote meetings, however, continue to confound me. Everything about remote meetings saps more energy than the in-person equivalent. By itself, any one thing does not amount to much. But, by the end of a meeting, I am completely drained. I have no fight left. I care more about reaching the end than reaching consensus. In my experience, eye
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Wide Links #13: Delivery, Definitions, Data
Distributed insights for distributed teams. The week’s best posts about dispersed teams and remote work, from around the web. In this edition: seminars from successful distributed team leaders, an article that makes a thought-provoking distinction between being on a dispersed team and being a remote worker, some tips on convincing a manager to let you go remote, and much more. Holla, An Open-source Group Chat App – Annotated tags: wideteams Holla is a simple group chat application that Developer Alex MacCraw describes as being a little like an open-source version of Campfire, 37Signals’ collaboration tool. Holla doesn’t have all of the advanced features that Campfire has, like built-in conference calling. However, it does support file sharing, and it’s free and runs on your own server, so you get to retain a degree of control that
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Retrospectives for Dispersed Teams
Many agile teams practice regular retrospectives – meetings where they evaluate review recent progress, events, and challenges, gauge the team’s mood, and propose changes to the way they work. For distributed teams, the retrospective is especially important. Here are some tips for holding a retrospective with a remote team. In any team it’s a good idea to take some time regularly to look back, discuss what went well and what went not so well, and make adjustments. In Agile software development this meeting is known as a Retrospective. Esther Derby and Diana Larsen describe a Retrospective like this: A special meeting where the team gathers after completing an increment of work to inspect and adapt their methods and teamwork. For dispersed teams, retrospectives are essential. Because dispersed teams are so dependant on effective practices and
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Avoid meeting hiccups with a dress rehearsal
Coordinating a large remote meeting can seem like putting on a major stage production. Make sure your meetings go off without a hitch by practicing first. Picture this: it’s time for the very first whole-company monthly meeting since adding remote team members to the team. The presentation slides are all ready, everyone is at their desk, the clock is ticking – and half the company can’t connect to the videoconferencing server. You start a frantic troubleshooting session. People are tapping their fingers. Your manager starts wondering if building a dispersed team was such a great idea. This scenario is all too common in distributed teams. The fact is, remote workers are dependent on technology in order to make collaboration possible, and that technology doesn’t always perform as expected – often going down at the worst
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Wide Links #12: Agility, Attitude, Independence
A sampling of the week’s best articles about distributed teams and remote work, from around the web. This week, notes on distributed agile software development; an article that says changing mindset is a bigger barrier to remote work than adopting new tools; a post about how working remotely helps workers become more independent and self-directed; and much, much more. Distributed Agile: Cultural Differences/Expectation disconnect – Annotated Some notes on distributed software teams from a ThoughtWorks developer working in India. tags: wideteams As I mentioned in my first post about distributed agile a couple of months ago I’ve found that it’s much easier to build the wrong thing when working in a different time zone to the product owner but I wouldn’t say the ability to write maintainable code is much different. 6 rules for
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Wide Links #11: Trust, Balance, Camping
For your reading enjoyment, a fresh batch of links from around the web! In this installment: building trust on distributed teams, maintaining balance at home when home IS work, and working remotely while camping across Europe. Trust Matters – Annotated An article about building trust in distributed teams. tags: wideteams When someone starts a call with: “So, how was everyone’s weekend?” really share something: “We had so much fun; my 5 year old daughter is playing T-ball and the girls were hilarious whacking at the ball and running around the bases.” We trust those who are willing to take the small risk of revealing something about themselves; encourage it, especially by role-modeling it. The Future of Web Working: Management – Annotated A quick guide to getting started managing a virtual team. tags: wideteams How do people
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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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