Posts Tagged ‘teams’
-
Wide Links #17
Some of my favorite reading on dispersed teams from the last week. In this edition: investing in your home office; staying in touch with your team; agile software practices for distributed teams; giving a presentation over the internet, and much more. Where to Invest for the Biggest Productivity Gains You can save a lot of money by working remotely, but that doesn’t mean you should skimp on the tools that really matter. A few strategically chosen expenditures can dramatically increase your productivity and connectivity. tags: wideteams Remote workers can’t escape talking on the phone, or its modern day equivalents. I personally have a fairly expensive handset hooked up to my landline, which I use when it’s important to have great call quality and a connection I can depend upon. You might not consider a landline
Read More » -
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
Read More » -
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
Read More » -
5 myths of remote work
Working in a dispersed team has its share of challenges, but some of the fears that people have about remote work simply aren’t born out by the experience of real-world teams. Here are a few if the more common misconceptions I’ve encountered. Working outside the office is distracting. This is one of the most persistent myths I’ve run into. Sure, working from home can be distracting. But out of the remote workers I’ve talked to, the majority find their home office a better environment for focused work than a traditional office.Which shouldn’t really come as a surprise. After all, if you work with people you like, it means that your workplace is going to be filled with people you have a lot in common with, having conversations about things that are interesting to you! While
Read More » -
Wide Links #9: Smart, Productive, Agile
It’s been a while since I did one of these. In this edition, productivity tips, videos, notes on distributed Agile processes, and more. A short video interview with Salim Ismail He talks about the importance of meeting your team in person at the start of a project. But what I found most interesting is when he says that he sees dispersed teams as a way to get the best possible talent no matter where they are located. tags: wideteams Work Smart 2: Stay Connected While Telecommuting | Fast Company – Annotated A lot of great advice in this short video. tags: wideteams Working remotely is so liberating–you get to do what you do best, in a location of your choice, without your co-workers or boss always looking over your shoulder. But telecommuting also requires a
Read More » -
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
Read More » -
Wide Teams Podcast Episode 13: Interviews with Jody Alkema and Peter van Hardenburg
Two final interviews from RailsConf 2010 this week. The first is with Jody Alkema, a web developer with Domain 7 who spoke to me about his experience augmenting his Agile software team with some remote help. The second is with Peter van Hardenburg, a developer at Heroku who is transitioning back to a collocated team after a couple years of working remotely
Read More » -
Wide Teams Podcast Episode 12: Interview with David Rogers
In this episode I talk to Ruby on Rails software developer David Rogers of Beacon Interactive Systems about his experiences working collocated, fully remote, and as a part of a mixed collocated/remote team
Read More » -
Wide Teams Podcast Episode 11: Interview with John McCaffrey
In this episode I talk to John McCaffrey, a software consultant who specializes in ironing out performance problems in Ruby on Rails applications. In the course of his consulting he works with dispersed teams, and in this interview he delivers a detailed rundown of the tools and workflow involved in doing Agile software development in a distributed team
Read More » -
Wide Teams Podcast Episode 10: Interview with Aslak Hellesøy
In this episode: an interview with Aslak Hellesøy, who talks about the contrasts between coordinating a large Open-Source project and a small dispersed team; the importance of constantly re-evaluating your tools and practices; and more. Also: theme music!
Read More »
The Wide Teams Podcast
A weekly podcast featuring interviews with people who are making dispersed teams work day by day.
Subscribe in iTunes- agile Agile Project Management campfire collaboration communication conferences conferencing development dispersed dispersed teams distributed distributed agile distributed teams howto ichat Interviews Links management meetings pair programming podcast podcasts practices presence productivity project management rails railsconf remote remote collaboration remote work screencasts skype software teams telecommuting telework tools twitter video videoconferencing virtual teams work workshifting yammer
