In this episode, Greg Bell, of Reverb Software, talks about mistakes he made during the early stages of managing a distributed team and what he’s done to combat those mistakes, and the ideal people that make up a widely distributed team.
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Show Notes:
Twitter: @gregbell
REVERB Software
Greg Bell Design + Development
github/gregbell
Ruby Open Source Challenge
00:44 – Greg Bell Introduction and Background
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- Based in Vancouver, Canada
- Reverb has 6 staff members distributed around the world: France and Vancouver
- Shared office space that can be utilized
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02:05 – Type of software worked on
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Rails applications in medical and pharmaceutical enterprise spaces
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03:00 – History with distributed teams
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- First experiences weren’t so good
- Inherited distributed developers
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05:20 – What went wrong at first?
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- Good technology wasn’t in place to allowl continuous communication
- No IRC or Hip Chat
- No daily standups
- Language barrier
- Time zone alignment
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08:30 – Plans to avoid future mistakes while managing a distributed team
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- Try to get people in the same room as much as possible
- Face time
- Keep the team connected
- Having the right people
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09:45 – Ideal people
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- Enjoy writing down what they are doing
- Documenting thoughts
- Making it obvious what they are up to
- Detail tickets
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11:20 – A day in the life
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- Daily standup over Google Hangouts
- Additional conversations between teams
- HipChat all day
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13:14 – HipChat
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- Easy to use
- Integrated one-on-one video chat
- More private than Skype
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15:10 – Division of work between people in Vancouver and people in France
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- Everyone works on projects together
- Meeting with clients is harder for those located in France
- Iteration planning
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18:42 – Being stalled during work due to others being unavailable
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- Always have multiple independent tasks you could be working on
- Changing how you orient standups
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23:00 – Connecting with clients
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- Tracking conversations
- Taking meeting notes
- Side conversations with clients can give a lot of context
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25:08 – Dealing with young members of teams
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- Training/programs for young developers out of college
- Remote pair programming
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29:05 – Number one piece of advice for someone getting into distributed work
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- Show progress
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