Posts Tagged ‘remote work’
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The Narrating Your Work Experiment
Hans de Zwart recently finished an experiment in which he encouraged his distributed team to “narrate their work”—to issue frequent updates to the team about what they were doing. In this article, he discusses the results of the experiment. This article was originally posted on Hans’ blog, and he has kindly granted permission to reprint it here. A few months back I posted a design for an experiment on my blog. The goal of the experiment was to find out whether it would be possible to use a microblogging tool to narrate our work with the intention of making better performing virtual teams. Over the last two months, the direct team that I work in (consisting of 18 people) basically participated in the experiment in the way that it was designed: They posted constant, daily or weekly updates
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Podcast #28: Shane Pearlman of Shane & Peter
In this episode I talk to Shane Pearlman of Shane & Peter, a fully dispersed software consultancy. We talked about recruiting the right kinds of people for a distributed team, and how to stay connected as friends as well as coworkers. Show notes: Shane Pearlman is @justlikeair on Twitter Shane & Peter Check out the Shane & Peter Lifeblog Redmine Adium Coworking Freelance Camp
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Podcast #27: Susan Tenby & Jessica Dally of TechSoup
This podcast is a departure from the dispersed software development teams I usually cover. I interviewed Susan Tenby and Jessica Dally of TechSoup, a nonprofit focused on providing other nonprofits with the technology they need to better accomplish their missions. One way they assist nonprofits is in helping them to use Second Life, a massive on-line “virtual world”, to collaborate and build community online. I talked to Susan and Jessica about why TechSoup is a distributed organization, and why organizations are using Second Life to meet, network, and do their work. For someone who spends a lot of time doing remote collaboration, it was eye-opening for me to discover this whole new frontier of online interaction. After listening to this interview you may just be inspired to add a virtual world meeting space to your
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Encouraging Involvement in Distributed Teams
One of the biggest challenges in remote work is simply making sure everyone has a strong sense of involvement. In this article Steven Baker, a veteran of dispersed agile software development teams, shares his experiences and recommendations for keeping the communication, camaraderie, and personal connections alive in a distributed setting. When you don’t occupy the same office for the same period of time every day with your co-workers, you can’t walk to your co-worker’s desk, or turn around in your chair to have a chat about what you’re working on. There is no water cooler to mill around get in the loop on what’s happening, and having lunch together is difficult. Differences in location, timezone, and working hours, can all combine to make you and the members of your team disconnected from each other. This
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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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Ten Reasons to Assemble a Dispersed Team
I’ve talked a lot about the “how” of dispersed teams on this site, but what about the “why”? Here are ten reasons to build a geographically distributed team. You’re trying to build a lean startup, creating the first version of your product without taking any VC funding. You’re working after-hours while still doing freelance work to pay the bills. You can’t very well ask your team members to pick up and move to your location – or even commute to an office – while they are working purely for equity. Remote collaboration may be the only way to get the talent you need while staying on a shoestring budget. You are building a software company in one of the great tech hub cities, and you’ve realized it’s hard to find talent at any price because
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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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The Wide Teams Podcast
A weekly podcast featuring interviews with people who are making dispersed teams work day by day.
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