Better Software - March 2008 - (Page 47)

The Last Word Modern Distributed Teams by Chris McMahon You have features to build. You have features to sell. You have problems to solve. And, if you’re like most businesses, the people who accomplish all this for you live within a few miles of your home office. But some businesses hire experts anywhere in the world to build their features, sell their products, and solve their problems. Distributed teams and remote workers are starting to come into their own, thanks to new processes and new tools—and some creative uses of old ones. When telecommuting and distributed working became a popular subject in the mainstream press in the mid-1990s, the infrastructure needed to support such arrangements was not really mature. People were viewed more as cogs in a machine than as creators of valuable artifacts, processes were more about pushing paper and checking boxes than generating value, and the tools to support working remotely were both primitive and expensive. The most common distributed-team arrangement was a classic waterfall situation, with (supposedly) detailed requirements being passed on to (supposedly) expert, well-informed outsiders, who (theoretically) implemented the requirements correctly all alone in their garrets, and returned their completed assignments to headquarters, where everything was integrated perfectly according to the schedule. There were failures—but that is changing. People Your business is at a point where it needs some employees with special skills. What happens if no one with those skills lives near your office? Or even worse: What if the system administrator you need lives in the Midwest, the star developer you need is in Vancouver and wants to work with a partner in Virginia, and the perfect tester lives in a small town in Colorado? You could compromise and hire people without the expertise you really need—most businesses do—or you could hire a consultancy that would fly in these experts to work on your projects. Of course, you’ll pay for their transportation and expenses as well as their expertise. But what if you could grow an awesome team of experts to solve your business problems by hiring people with exactly the right skills, regardless of where they happen to live? More and more, this becomes possible with modern processes and modern tools. We can see each other’s expressions and understand things like irony or exasperation. We can ask people what they think. We can tell people what we think. We can point to things— computers, charts, diagrams, even the weather. To make distributed teams productive, we have to find ways to provide the same kind Processes of communication bandwidth The traditional command that the water cooler provides. and-control management strucHere is a look at some of the ture is not effective with remote tools to consider using with workers. Even in the most rigid distributed teams: of hierarchical management VoIP. Skype is good, but structures, people rely on infora dedicated Asterisk server is mal communication and shared better. At my workplace, we context to work effectively. The routinely have company calls meetings at the water cooler are several times a week with actually effective. fifty or so people listening on For distributed teams, proja single call. We can do this ect-based management struc- Tools When we have a discussion because we have a dedicated tures and heterarchies (not Asterisk server. hierarchies) are a lot more ef- at the water cooler: fective than traditional command-and-control management structures. Conveniently, agile methods like Scrum and other management ideas based on equal participation by everyone on a team provide proven frameworks for executing projects successfully. Agile processes have really made distributed teams productive. Good things happen when everyone is an equal member of the team and when pairing is routine, standup meetings happen frequently, and Big Visible Charts show everyone what’s going on. But if you rely on intermediaries (like managers) to keep everyone informed of everyone else’s doings by moderating communication among workers, it’s like the children’s game of “telephone,” and the messages are quickly lost or garbled without the self-correcting water-cooler meetings. Even worse is when management relies on remote workers to keep them informed about projects but doesn’t supply the telecommuters the tools to communicate with their peers. That situation quickly turns to farce if not tragedy. Regardless of the exact process you follow, the critical factors for the success of distributed teams are processes that include rather than exclude, and modes of communication with the highest bandwidth possible. The traditional command-and-control management structure is not effective with remote workers. Even in the most rigid of hierarchical management structures, people rely on informal communication and shared context to work effectively. www.StickyMinds.com MARCH 2008 BETTER SOFTWARE 47 http://www.StickyMinds.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Better Software - March 2008

Better Software - March 2008 Contents Mark Your Calendar Contributors eLightenment Technically Speaking Code Craft Test Connection Management Chronicles Cover Story: Breaking Ground On SOA Software Development Worst Practices Mind the Gap Product Announcements 10 Things You Might Not Know About... The Last Word Ad Index

Better Software - March 2008

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