Wide Teams

Episode #85: Allen Maxwell of EmpowerIT

Jun 12, 13 • In Featured, Interviews, Podcast

In this episode, Allen Maxwell of EmpowerIT, talks about several remote tools and resources, collaborative drawing and design, and making remote working work. Show Notes: Allen Maxwell (twitter github [email protected]) 00:36 – Allen Maxwell Introduction 03:09 – Working Remotely 06:46 – “A Day in the Life” 07:24 – Working with Team Members 10:17 – The Evolution of Remote Tools and Pair Programming 14:25 – Making remote working work 16:43 – Collaborative Drawing & Design 21:10 – Face-to-face meetings and nonverbal cues

Podcast #32: Louis Font of Zyncro

May 16, 12 • In Featured, Interviews, Podcast

In this episode I talk to Louis Font of Zyncro. We talk about his internationally distributed team and how they, as a company, seek to be available to customers 24/7 no matter what time zone they are located in, solving communication gaps between businesses and social networks, and how important physical communication is in the world of remote work. Show Notes: ZyncroBlog Twitter: @zyncro Facebook 00:40 – Introduction 02:22 – Louis’ background 04:20 – Distributed team structure and background 09:08 – Challenges working distributed 10:30 – Cultural differences between team members 12:00 – Zyncro as a company 16:22 – Advice for distributed teams 17:20 – Future of distributed teams

Podcast #24: Derek Wade

Feb 15, 11 • In Interviews, Podcast

In this episode, a conversation with Derek Wade, a collaboration expert and Team Coach at Kumido Adaptive Systems. We talk about building “high-gravity” distributed teams, work-scapes, and the benefits of simple, free-form tools for collaboration. This episode is “back from the dead” — all of the audio from my side of the interview was lost, but I reconstructed and re-dubbed my questions so that I could share this interview. Show notes: Derek can be found at derekwwade.net, and is @derekwwade on Twitter. Slides for the presentation “High Gravity Distributed Teams“ The #lrnchat hashtag on Twitter I did a video demo of the Cardmeeting tool

Wide Teams Podcast #21: Interview with Tony Amoyal

Dec 7, 10 • In Interviews, Podcast

Can you work remotely from a snowboarding vacation in Montana? Software developer Tony Amoyal says "why not?". In this episode, he and I discuss the tradeoffs involved in being part of a software team while staying mobile

Wide Teams Podcast #20: Interview with Thomaz Leite

Nov 30, 10 • In Interviews, Podcast

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

Have a spam day! Making communication tools fun.

Nov 8, 10 • In Practices

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

Wide Teams Podcast #18: Ruby DCamp 2010 Part 3

Nov 3, 10 • In Interviews, Podcast

The third and final part of a series. This is a recording of a round-table discussion on distributed software teams held at the Ruby DCamp 2010 unconference in northern Virginia. Be sure too listen to Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven’t already. Show notes: The Ruby DCamp website Trevor Lalish-Menagh [email protected] on Twitter and blogs at http://trevmex.com/ Nick Gauthier of SmartLogic Solutions [email protected] on Twitter Chris Strom [email protected]_c on Twitter and blogs at http://japhr.blogspot.com/ Camille Bell doesn’t have a Twitter account that I could find, but perhaps she will correct me. Jim Gay of Saturn Flyer [email protected] on Twitter Brian Glusman of ENJYN [email protected] on Twitter Apologies to the other participants whose info I wasn’t able to hunt down – please comment or email me and I’ll update this post!

Wide Links #13: Delivery, Definitions, Data

Oct 29, 10 • In Links

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

Wide Teams Podcast Episode 15: Intridea

Oct 11, 10 • In Interviews, Podcast

Intridea is one of the largest fully dispersed software companies that I’m aware of, and they are still growing fast. I’ve talked to them before – back in episode 9, I spoke with Michael Bleigh. When I visited the Ruby Hoedown in Nashville a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to talk to a whole passel of Intrideans. We talked about why Intridea chose to build a distributed team, how they manage software teams that are spread across the world, and the tools they have used and built to facilitate communication

Wide Teams Podcast #6: BohConf Roundtable Part 1

Jul 19, 10 • In Podcast

Today on the podcast, a recording of a roundtable discussion held at the BohConf unconference inside of RailsConf 2010. Topcs covered include teleconferencing practices, why instant messaging can be an antipattern, and different strategies for estimating work