RallyDev.com
Tue 23 Mar 2010
7 Ways to Make Life Better for Your Remote Team Members
I’m traveling this week to Rally’s Agile Success Tour in San Diego. I love attending these events because they’re a lot of fun and participants seem to get a lot of value – getting out of the office for a half day is a great way to learn and think about how you can get started or get better with Agile. Plus, the Rancho Bernardo Inn is pretty nice place to spend a day.
The site of Rally's Agile Success Tour - the Rancho Bernardo Inn
But my day job is as a Product Owner, so I’m still trying to keep up with my team while on the road. And this trip has been a good reminder of the challenges of working remotely. Here are seven things I’ve remembered that make a big difference if your team has remote members:
1. Actually log in to your chat client.
Instant messaging is a great way to quickly make contact with people on your team, but if everyone isn’t actually logged in to chat, you often can’t reach the best person. If I want to talk to Fred, but I can’t reach him, I’ve got to make a decision – do I wait, or do I interrupt Jason, a developer on his team?
2. Dial in the bridge.
If you’re having a meeting, and you have remote team members, make connecting to the conference bridge a habit, even if you don’t think anyone remote is going to be attending. Plans change; something comes up such that someone who was going to be in the office is out. If you don’t connect the conference bridge, remote employees will either give up, or frantically try to catch local participants on IM in the hopes that someone brought a laptop to the meeting.
3. Check in and out on the phone.
Assign someone in your meeting to remember the remote team members during the discussion. And make sure you check in with the people on the phone before you hang up at the end of the call. (Give them a few seconds to unmute before you assume they’re gone!)
4. List your cell numbers.
At Rally, we have a Google spreadsheet that lists office and cell numbers for everyone. I’m rarely at my desk during the workday, so cell is the only reliable way to reach me.
5. Skype your standups.
In our team room, a couple of the machines have Skype running. When you’re remote, video goes a long way to improving connection with the team. Showing some video of the absurd furnishings or the view outside the hotel room makes it fun. This morning, I had some bandwidth issues and could only use voice – it didn’t work nearly as well. Also, with a team like mine, a remote employee who doesn’t enable video for an early morning Skype session will invariably be subject to baseless accusations of not wearing pants.
6. Leave Skype running for a few minutes after the standup is over.
Often interesting conversations pop up in the 30 minutes following this meeting. As a PO, I often overhear useful bits of information at this time, and it makes it easy for people to ask me questions they might have forgotten during the standup.
7. Update your stories.
This morning, when I logged into Rally, it looked like a ton of work was in progress. Turns out, my team just hadn’t updated their tasks and stories. Often Rally is the window your remote team members have into what’s going on. If you don’t update stories, you can end up with unnecessary confusion. Fortunately, we cleared it up in our daily standup meeting.
These were the things I remembered this week. So what tips do you have for making life easier on remote team members?
So items 1-6, in short, are “make sure you have adequate (and, where possible, video) channels of communication available, and used, throughout the day”?
Sure, that’s part of it. But really what I’m getting at is that even if you think you have adequate channels of communication available, it’s easy to overlook small details that make a big difference.
For example, if you have 10 people in the room and 1 person on the phone, it’s really easy to just click off a speakerphone when the meeting is over without checking in with the person on the other end. It feels natural when you’re in the room, but really abrupt when you’re the remote person, especially if you have been having a hard time hearing.
If I had to summarize 1-6, I’d say it’s that better communication comes from making extra effort to have a personal connection with remote people.
Use remote desktop sharing tools to pair.
Our entire team is remote as the company closed our remote office. We had just starting pairing regularly in the last 6 months before the office closed and it was a major concern for us. We started using iLinc for sharing our desktops while using a phone line to chat while working. IT updated the version of MS Communicator and we have been using that now for desktop sharing.
It works great to have the driver sharing their desktop and navigator looking up information on their own PC. Pairing has been very successful for us as a team, even remotely.
Great list of tips to make remote working better for the remote users and employers. I will be using most of them. Cheers
1. We publish our development artefacts in a Wiki.
2. We use IP Phones
3. Since we work from different time zones, I check and respond to emails several times a day and also at night before I go to bed.
4. We make good use of offline messages on IM
5. We use Subvesrion for version control hosted on a central server. Developers can access it using https (mod_svn on apache) from anywhere.
6. We use webex for remote desktop sharing.
Alex, Nice blog! All these 7 things are essential. In case of virtual teams, it is very critical to be online on ‘available’ during overlapping hours. Also, it is very essential to utilize the right means of communication in order to improve efficiency!
Cheers,
Raja