Saturday, September 19, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Bad Webinar Content? Technology? Both? = Frustrated Diana #corenet
I'm not sure if this makes more crazy than anything else, but I do want to gnaw my knuckles when I'm at a presentation that's using 10-year-old technology, and 20-year-old content... Maybe I should give these presentations, I could at least cut both of those numbers in half...
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Responsibilities (or, Policies and Procedures)
As I was thinking of the ways teams become “accidentally” distributed (in other words, not on purpose), I also started thinking about whose responsibility it is to solve problems for distributed teams. For example, if one person in a company starts working remotely a few days per week for personal reasons, that person usually has to work to make their remoteness transparent to their co-workers.
However, when the company makes a change which causes the team members to become distributed, whose responsibility is it to establish adequate processes to ensure that this team works well together?
My (current) company has a Flexible Work program group, which oversees and sets policies on how employees can work from a variety of locations. This includes procedures, policies, and reporting on reserving an office or conference room, temporarily working from another office, reimbursement for things like cell phones, and working from home.
Very few people here sit with their co-workers, even when they do come into the same office every day. Over the fifteen years of this program, teams have wound up with people from all over the world, even though the people themselves haven’t moved around much. The goal is to choose the “right” person for a team, which means they have the right skill mix, and are available for the project. This is almost always a better, faster, and cheaper solution than trying to create a team of appropriate skills from people who happen to be both nearby as well as available.
Although most teams can then contain the correct mix of people, these people may be in several locations. “Face-to-face” or in-person meetings are not feasible, at least not more than once or twice a year. Most people (and managers) think in-person meetings are the most useful and efficient, but what are the other options when you can’t hold your meetings face-to-face?
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
How do Teams Become Distributed?
Many companies without a formal distributed work program may still find themselves needing and wanting to support distributed teams. Here are some ways that a team may become distributed:
* your company decides to delegate some specific chunks of work to a group in another location; e.g., programming to India, QA to Colorado. However, you still want to make sure these groups stay in sync with the rest of the team.
* the company acquires a new company, and is eager to integrate a newly acquired employee (and their skills) into an existing team or project
* a person with required skills is found in a different location, and no one with the required skills is available in the same location as the rest of the team
* two or more teams merge, with each team in a different location
* the company may decide to close a campus for real estate or other reasons, and may not want to relocate all of the employees (nor lay them off)
* a local or national government, for pandemic reasons, orders all offices within the city limits to close for two weeks to stop the spread of a flu or other disease. How can you keep your company still working?
There are more examples of this, so I’ll continue this list in a future post. I’ll also discuss how to approach the issues and finding best practices to help these teams.
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