Distributed? Yes. Alone? No. As I’ve sent these Pragmatic Managers about geographically distributed teams and received these responses from many of you, I keep hearing one theme: “I thought I was the only one dealing with this issue.” You are not alone. Many of you have sent emails and asked questions. I answered those privately, […]
Developing and Nurturing Respect in Geographically Distributed Teams Joseph, a tester, was reading an email from a developer in Germany. He exploded out of his chair, and ran to the product owner. “Those people have no respect for us! How can they ask us to do this?? Don’t they realize what they are asking for?
Building or Maintaining Agility in Geographically Distributed Teams By now, with all of my tips, you have a good idea about how to start a project with your geographically distributed team. You have a project charter. You have a timezone bubble chart. That helps everyone see where people are in the world. Those two things help
Managing Timezones in Geographically Distributed Agile Teams Your managers have asked you to start a project with people all over the world. What’s the first thing you might do? Draw a bubble chart of time zone dispersion to visualize your time zones to see who is where and offset by how much. I bet that
Micromanagement is Not Transparency! Do you want to know what your geographically distributed team is doing? Maybe your team has a sticky-card wall. Or a kanban board. And, maybe they post pictures of it on their wiki. Or, maybe they use a tool and talk about their status in their standup meetings. And, maybe because
Using Checkins to Create Transparency Do You Want to Work More Effectively in Geographically Distributed Teams? In preparation for our geographically distributed teams webinar last week, Shane and I asked people what their greatest challenge was for their teams. Many of the comments were about communication and trust. One question was this: “How can I help
Build Trust in Any Team (Distributed or Collocated) On agile projects, the daily standup is one of the ways the team members build trust. The team members complete work every day, and make micro-commitments to each other every day. Making and keeping these commitments builds trust. And, when you’re not all together, it’s just a
Simone, a French project manager, emailed me. “Johanna, we are having trouble getting the people together. These people worked together before on the previous release. But on this release, they are not working together. I’ve done these things,” and she listed a number of smart ideas. I replied by email, “Where’s the project charter with
Vol 9, #3: Always Ask the Zeroth Question About Your Projects Jan 17, 2012, ISSN: 2164-1196 Sometimes, you wonder why you are doing this project. You spend all this time on it, you’re sure there isn’t much value from the project, and still, the project is on the top of your manager’s list. There’s
Are You Being Guilted Into Doing More? Ned, a development manager I know, looked exhausted. “I’m trying to keep development going, and support pre-sales, and support post-sales, and support customer support. When is my group supposed to have time to do development??” He has a point. If his team does all the nice-guy work, they