1 Untitled

Interesting article.

posted at 12:22 pm on February 05, 2008 by sunil sk

2 Communication Style

Where I work we communicate almost exclusively via chat, even though we have a shared workspace (it’s so we don’t have to take our headphones off), while with my own usually non-technical freelance clients I find that many of them end up breathing a sigh of relief when I finally get around to picking up the phone and calling them.

posted at 02:58 pm on February 05, 2008 by Scott Lenger

3 Efficiency through brevity

I work daily with designers and developers across the US, and truth be told, I have a much easier time working on challenging projects when there is a geographic split.

I’ve noticed a tendency of people to over-communicate (in a good way) through very concise bursts of information when there are a few states/timezones splitting up the team. When the entire group is under one roof there is a tendency to schedule excess status meetings, or make possibly false assumptions regarding who is working on which parts of a given task – e.g. I saw the presentation deck up on Kevin’s screen, so he must be working on it.

Since line of sight can’t be established, folks tend to send out more informal, more helpful status updates. It seems like the quantity of <3 minute iChat video conferences and the quality of SVN comments on file commits skyrocket when I am not sitting within earshot of the person I am working with. There is still certainly a time and a place for groups to huddle together in a room and slug through big projects, but through the glories of telepresence I don’t think it is required quite as often as it once was. I think the requirement for a successful project is clear and open communication, not physical face-time.

posted at 03:32 pm on February 05, 2008 by james vreeland

4 Staying in Contact

Maintaining contact between all team members is so important. In past projects I’ve seen team members go dark for days only to come out of their cave with either not much done or they took something in the wrong direction.

Leverage the tools that are out there => Campfire , IRC, IM, or whatever.

posted at 03:48 pm on February 05, 2008 by Matt Bumgardner

5 At the Office

Where I work we have a combination of communication. Ichat, email, face to face, phone. It seems to me like the best is always face to face to get a point across, although raw information always works better in a text format for me. Probably because I can save it and come back to it later if needed.

posted at 05:42 pm on February 05, 2008 by Aaron Payne

6 Basecamp and campfire

I don’t think that relationships in virtual team needs to be that tight (e-mails every day, VOIP all day). That sounds absolutely wrong. I work on client’s accounts every day communicating over Basecamp or Campfire approx. once a week. You don’t need to communicate that often when you keep it all logged. And as far as deliverables are met, it is OK to keep in touch once a week. It is very important to setup clear performance targets and stick to the deadlines.

posted at 11:47 pm on February 06, 2008 by František Malina

7 Follow up: Basecamp and campfire

In fact I do SEO and off-site marketing. I’d imagine that “campfire once a week” + “monthly reports” wouldn’t work for graphic design.

posted at 11:51 pm on February 06, 2008 by František Malina

8 Stay in touch

Depends on the project, but I don´t think that it is necessary to have contact every day. It is important to spend more time to unexperienced team members or with lower skills to meet the goal of the project.

posted at 10:41 pm on February 07, 2008 by David Pidt

10 virtual teams: make them real

It is important that teams distributed along the long corridor are not virtual but real. Real people, real roles. I always find it good to have one or more audioconferences to establish the reality of other team members. Communications are then dictated by the roles. Leaders may need to contact some individual members regularly, collaborative authors may collaborate on a wiki with regular but asynchronous communication, others may prefer to work in isolation but regularly update the team leader. Nice article it highlights a problem we are all just feeling our way through.

posted at 06:59 am on February 08, 2008 by Mark Wiseman