Posts Tagged ‘yammer’
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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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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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Wide Teams Podcast Episode 19: Interview with Steven Willmott
In this episode of the Wide Teams podcast, I interview Steven Willmott of 3Scale. We talk about supporting clients in multiple timezones, what you do when one of your developers who lives on a mountainside and generates his own power gets hit with a snowstorm, and much more!
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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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The Wide Teams Bootstrap Guide, Part 4: Virtual Presence
You have your mail hub, your video/audio chat solution, and your text chat service set up. What other communications tools does your distributed team need? To augment Campfire or IRC, I recommend setting up a team status/presence tool. The two most popular tools occupying this space are Presently and Yammer. With the exception of some downtime issues, I’ve had good luck with Present.ly in several organizations. In a nutshell, these apps are like Twitter for private groups.They enable team members to post short messages about their status, what they are thinking about, or problems they are experiencing. You may be wondering: is such an app really necessary when you already have a chat application? Don’t they overlap? It’s true, either a chat room or a presence app can be used to simulate the other. But ideally, they handle two
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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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