Managing a team that is entirely co-located is a luxury these days. Here are some tips to consider when faced with producing results with a team that is spread across the world.
1. Meet In Person at least once
Wait a minute. I thought this article was about managing a remote team and the first thing you tell me is to meet in person? Foul Ball! Well the truth of the matter is while technology continues to allow us to work more disconnected from each other, most humans thrive on social interaction. So it is really in the team's best interest to try, just once, to have as many people as you can meet in person. It is REALLY, REALLY important. There is something about meeting someone face to face that just takes the working relationship to the next level.
Look at it this way. Let's say there are 3 remote teams that you work with regularly. We meet on conference calls every week and we work out the challenges of the project and exchange information about what each of us needs to do our job. On the calls, you typically get right to the agenda, and out of the 15 or so people on each call, only a few ever talk. One week the team from San Diego finds a way to send their 4 top people to your location for a week. You spend 4 days working directly with these guests. Aside from working together, you also have a number of meals together, tour the local town one night, and at the end of the week you drive them to the airport (a 1 hour drive). You learn a lot about each other in 4 short days. The next time a challenge comes up and that team needs help, they are going to be real people to you. Real faces! You will be much more willing to work hard for that person than you would be for the 15 faceless and silent participants in your weekly conference calls. And they will want to work harder for you.
So make the case to spend the money, just one time. Do something constructive together - like plan the next release, or work through a complex technical problem, or take a training together. When everyone gets back to home base they will all have a much better appreciation for each other - and it will show in increased communication and response time.
2. Run Meetings Like They Were Live
When you have a meeting at the office you don't just show up and get started. People filter into the room (hopefully early or on time), talk about their day, maybe one guy brings candy, you might joke around a bit or ask about things at home. The pre-meeting chatter is what is missing in conference calls with remote team members. I've had positions where I attend lots of conference calls with remote people that I have never met. We normally get on the call, everyone is on mute and when all are assembled the meeting starts. There is no "buzz", it is boring, and you never really get to know the other people that well.
Here is a technique I used once when I was running a weekly meeting with a cross-functional product launch team. The team was a diverse group of people, from different disciplines (development, marketing, sales, services, etc) from all over the world many who had never met. We spend the first 3 minutes of each meeting having someone tell a personal story, or show some pics of their vacation, or talk about something happening in their office. It is natural that at first no one will want to share, so I started many of them off myself. But after a while you will find people want to meet each other. And once the personal relationship begins to form, it moves from a bunch of disconnected people to a team.
3. Know when to bail out of email.
Email is a revolutionary communication tool but be careful when things start to escalate in an email. I think email escalations have a higher chance of spiraling out of control between 2 people that are remote from each other than if they were co-located. If you are a manager and you are CC'd on a thread that is looking like a disagreement, it's time to get the two people on the phone. Or you are on an email discussion that is just going on forever without a resolution, also a cue that it's time to talk live. A good guideline is if an email gets to 2 replies and is not closed, it's time to pick up the phone. (You remember, that thing on your desk or attached to your person that we used to use to actually talk to real human.)
4. Have centralized systems.
I feel very strongly that a solid Development Infrastructure is important for any organization, but it is even more important if people are distributed. Everyone should have access to all the things they need to get their job done from all sites equally. In other words, centralized systems for source code, defect tracking, requirements management, etc. I've seen some teams try to keep code managed at different locations and then do an occasional integration effort to bring it together. This goes against a continuous integration methodology and typically hides major issues until much later in the cycle. Many years ago this may have made sense since connecting remote networks was often slow and/or expensive. Today that is a non-issue, so get it centralized.
To that point, where is central? If you reside in HQ and that is where you decide to host your development infrastructure, get out to the remote sites and determine if the level of performance, convenience and accessibility to the tools is as good as it is from HQ.
5. Instant Messaging.
Good tool for remote teams. If your company has a standard, consider making it mandatory. If not, consider the IP and privacy concerns before using a public service. It's an important tool because it provides the equivalent of dropping into someone's office or yelling over the cubicle wall for a quick question. It is effective for remote teams but make sure it isn't abused. You might want some guidelines with your team, such as respect for "Do not Disturb" mode, or not expecting an answer right away (since IM can be distracting). I've seen some teams institute a few hours a day with no IM or phone meetings. I like that idea too!
6. Video conferencing.
Despite the fact that the technology can be easily obtained by simply putting a camera on everyone's computer (if they do not already have one), I have not seen it effectively implemented. Probably close to 15 years ago now I remember being on a small distributed development team and we all decided we were going to use web cams to communicate using a point to point technology called CU-SeeMe. We made the pitch to our manager and he outfitted us all with webcams. After we were done getting our new gear working and screwing around with our friends on camera, we never fired them up again. For some reason people that are totally fine speaking to you face to face just are not comfortable having their mug on a camera. That said, if you can get over the initial adoption curve there is nothing like being able to see body language and facial expressions. Be the leader and do your web presentations with your camera on. Buy your team cameras, encourage video conferencing, and start establishing some eye contact with your team.
7. Assign a Strong Local Manager.
If the remote team has more than 3 or 4 people, I recommend appointing a local manager to motivate, resolve conflicts, and ensure efficient operations. An army wouldn't send a platoon into battle without an officer in charge on the ground. So you should not leave your teams out there floundering by themselves. It does not need to be a full-time dedicated manager in all cases. Some teams have done this successfully even having a manager from another local group represent them. Your remote team will benefit from having a strong local leader that can keep them informed, run ahead figuring out the next set of challenges, and represent the team connecting it with all the other organizations they need to interact with.
8. Frequent Manager Contact with Remote Individuals.
Leaders should have frequent and regular 1:1 meetings with every person on the remote team. If the team is large, then you will need to limit the frequent contact to just your leads and less frequent for everyone else. If you were all in the same office, you would probably drop in the person's cube from time to time anyway. So why not schedule just 10 min every week to catch up in person. The team members will feel connected and you will gain knowledge about what people are thinking that you can not get from email exchanges.
9. Do not underestimate the impact of Cultural Differences
This is one of the trickiest and most difficult pieces of the puzzle to decipher when leading a globally distributed team. Cultural differences exist between all teams. Don't think this only applies to teams that are located outside your home country. I'm talking about the accepted norms and general working style of the team. HOW do they communicate? HOW do they get work done? HOW do they make decisions? A team usually develops their working culture over many years. Some teams like to do more up-front planning while others prefer to work in a more iterative fashion. One team might adopt a very short, direct and efficient communication style that another team might interpret as rude. The experience and maturity of the teams may also play a factor in how they operate. A team that never checks-in code without first developing an automated unit test will have a very hard time working with a team following a traditional waterfall development model.
Of course if part of your team is located overseas, then the issue just got a bit more complex. You need to add in time zone juggling, standard working hours, local "customs" or even labor laws may play a significant role in how the team operates.
Electing not to consider the cultural differences between your distributed teams is a major oversight. Do not expect to simply impose your team's culture on them overnight. I have seen this attempted but hardly ever successful. That is not to imply that you should tolerate behaviors that run counter to your overall company values. But within the boundaries of these values you might want to consider evolving a new "blended" culture to move the entire organization forward. You may find that some of the practices of the remote team are simply superior to your own and you may want to incorporate them into your new blended culture.
In order to drive your new culture, you first need to understand what you have to work with. In my estimation there is really only one way to understand the culture of your teams and that is to get shoes on the ground. Get embedded with the team for a week or two to understand what has made them successful, and what is holding them back. Follow-up often (live if feasible) as you begin to meld your distributed team. With careful observation, management, and an action plan to move forward - hopefully you can create a 1+1=3 scenario by incorporating the best from all your teams.
10. Tools
Of course there are a wide range of communication tools that you might find give your remote teaming situation an edge. Here are some of my favorites:
Electronic Whiteboards - Very useful for engineering teams. I have used a product called e-Beam for years. It has minimal equipment which is very portable and uses a standard whiteboard letting you draw with standard dry erase markers. The resulting drawings are displayed on your computer as well as the remote person's screen. They can also be saved for retrieval later.
Whiteboard Photo - If you regularly communicate via whiteboard drawings an easy to use whiteboard capture program is an inexpensive way to share those diagrams. For years I used a program called Whiteboard Photo that allows you to quickly take a photo of a whiteboard and it cleans it up and "unskews" it if you happened to take it on an angle. It's awesome! Looks like the software was purchased by a company called PolyVision who now has it buried so far on their website I could barely find it. (Search for Whiteboard Photo Polyvision to find a reseller). Now that I have an iPhone with a decent camera, I've found an app called Whiteboard Share from Ricoh Innovations that does the same and eliminates the step of bringing the photo to my computer. I feel a little guilty ditching my old friend Whiteboard Photo!
Social Business Collaboration Tools - This is a topic for a completely different article. But it is a growing area of next generation collaboration tools that get ideas out of email and into reusable forms. These products do more than just document management. They coordinate interaction between all of your teammates allowing the knowledge sharing to be captured, searched and easily reused by others. This will wind up being a corporate (or departmental) commitment to implementing a solution like Jive, Yammer, Sharepoint or Lotus Connections, but I highly recommend it. Of course, if you need some help from an expert I happen to recommend my brother @Andrew Kratz who is the founder of Social Edge Consulting .
Time zone juggling: If the remote teams are in different time zones then it will be important to have some overlap in the team's working hours. This might mean one or both teams need to adjust their standard work hours so that you have a few hours overlap to collaborate together. Offshore teams in certain regions of the world might already be used to skewing their hours. Be sensitive to the work/life balance of each team and be creative in how to design an overlap scenario. A handy site for meeting planning across time zones is www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html
Standard Fare - Probably goes without saying that having easy access to web conferencing, screen sharing and voice conference capabilities are at this point as important as a carpenter having a hammer. Look to get a solution that does both over IP to save money.
0 comments:
Post a Comment