Excellent, perceptive to understand the nature of a team bit and I agree with the functional definition. However, I strongly disagree with this quote and the theme of this particular article: “A team bit is out of time sync with the rest of the team. There is no way for this bit to build trust with the rest of the team.”

Through over 10 years of project management in ‘waterfall’ and agile s/w projects, I have seen both large, complex projects and small ones develop and demonstrate very strong, organic trust between team bits and team cores. As a project manager who has helped teams with completely co-located culture accept and fully integrate remotely located and critically important “bits” in Israel, Ireland, Taiwan, China, India, and Japan, it’s clear to me that doing so is completely replicable and teachable. The point about core and bits being “out of time sync” is indeed one of the challenges that needs to be worked, but it isn’t one of the top challenges, in my view.

I’m happy to discuss this more with anyone who is interested.

I shared your opinion years ago. Then, the manager of my agile team (he is also the most senior developer) had to move back to India. We all had to adjust, but with good ways for voice and video chat, wikis, digital photos and the like, it was not a significant velocity reduction over the long term.

Now I’m one of two remote members of an agile team. Of course, being remote has its down side. For example, my PC is broken and I have to ship it back. But, whatever downside is, I feel, made up by having people with exceptional talent and experience on the team, who otherwise would not be on the team.

My team set up a rolling cart for each remote team member, with a laptop, webcam, Skype and mic. My webcam displays on the laptop, and my team members roll ‘me’ around to whoever I’m pairing with, or to meetings (rolling through the halls saying hi to people is fun!) I can control the webcam to look for people.

We are on IRC all day. It’s a cultural challenge – the team has to get used to accommodating the remote people. But I think it is worth the effort.

We know that people make projects and products successful. Why not broaden out the available pool of great people, by embracing remote team members?

On my current team, the rest of the team is in a different state and colocated with the customer while I work out of my home on the other side of the country. And I know for sure that I communicate some of them and the customer more than some of them do.

So, I don’t believe it’s all about colocation. You can be colocated and still have lousy communication. Or you can be colocated and communicate okay but still fail at other vital things like delivering the “right” thing and maintaining a sustainable pace through quality and having the right skills and experience and having people that are passionate about what they do and holding one another accountable for delivering the best and being open to new ideas and perspectives…

Sure, it’s nice to be colocated, but I don’t think that’s a reason to write off people who are remote.

Jerry Helms
Non Stop Portals