DistributedWorkforces

From SPA Wiki

Notes from the SPA 2006 Goldfish Bowl held on 29 March, 2006:

The goal of this goldfish bowl was to explore the world of the Distributed work force which is now more supportable with new tcehnology. Another way to look at this is: "We’re suckers for technology but is it a good idea?" The session particularly focussed on people working from home for a company, rather than off shoring, outsourcing or conulting. The following is both summary and details of the comments made during the goldfish bowl:

Summary

• There are many motivations for supporting a distributed team
• The biggest (and currently insurmountable) issue seems to be around temporal. not physical, dislocattion (time zones are harder to bridge than people not being being in the office)
• Fully distributed teams are easier than primarily colocated teams with a few distributed members
• Agile processes (pairing, regular check ins, process for bringing on new people) support both the discipline and social needs of a distributed team
• Mutual respect and a shared goal are critical to a successful distributed team
• A distributed team must be allowed to develop its own clearly defined culture and habits

Motivations for work from home

• Balance work and home life - forced to embrace in order to retain or attract people
• Individuals want flexibility
• Sometimes caused by reorganizations that don’t follow geographical boundaries
• Accident - hire good people who wont relocate

Issues with work from home

• 21st century cubicle hell - very isolated, harder to manage, dehumanizing, demotivating and demoralizing
• Poor 2nd best in terms of the social aspects - not like being there at all. If you want to grow a development team and grow individual skills its hard to do in a distributed fashion. It’s the programming equivalent to telephone sex.
• Distributed teams - communication bandwidth of technology is very narrow compared to walking down the hall
• It’s not just communication, its collaboration. System development is a social activity. Rabbit hutches are anti social.
• Having two teams in different places is much worse than having everyone distributed. All feeling the same pain. With the former it’s often a primary team and others - a big disconnect, not part of the center, 8-hour time difference.
• There are dysfunctional teams in both collocated and distributed groups
• Also should be concerned with cross team collaboration where more communication problems happen
• Work at home people can dilute the team too much.
• Techniques where everyone is on the phone instead of some people in a meeting and others on the phone (hard to influence these practices if you’re the distributed one) - also some resentment from the non distributed people for having to lower their bandwidth to accommodate you
• One thing haven’t found technology to work - brainstorming - the equiv of standing in front of a white board
• Other person likes LiveMeeting but answer - its not the stuff on the white board - it’s the gesturing around it.
• Learning modes can be different - some people read, some people hear
• Bandwidth issues still exist - in UK cheap to download but not to upload. That’s why skype dies with greater than 4 people - the one who is hosting can't upload enough. Although some home workers have more bandwidth than they would at corporate because of incompetent IT departments.
• Half-life effect after an in person visit - everything gels well until the communication half life falls off.
• Psychological difference between getting up from your desk at work vs being at home and taking a break to do home chores. No implicit guarantee in the latter that the person will be available 9-5
• home working is not "being there", it's a poor second best
• communication bandwidth is still less than walking into someone's cube
• collaboration is human, not technical
• if you're absent from the "corridors of power" then you miss participating in the politics of the organisation (this could be good or bad)
• timezones are more of a problem than geography
• do you need a core of staff onsite? Can a team end up being too geographically diluted?
• Difficult to bring new people on board in a distributed environment.
• There needs to be a distributed working champion on the main site (ironically!)
• video conferencing between individuals is not necessarily better than just audio
• What management decides is a good idea ( eg outsourcing, distributed workforce…) is not necessarily concerned with what’s best for the people. "Management solutions" is an oxymoron.

Things to consider when deciding to allow or disallow work from home:

• We lose people if we don’t let them work at home. But allowing some to work at home can be a demotivator for those you don’t trust to do it. It shouldn’t be a reward or retention tool. Some people aren’t good at it and shouldn’t be allowed to do it.
• Kind of work matters - good with task oriented things, not so much with strategic shifts (politics discussed in the corridors, less well defined).
• remote working is OK if everyone is remote and suffers the same pain, but not if only some are remote
• No one size fits all - some people work very well alone, others don’t (even some who would like to work at home) - what are the characteristics?

Environments / techniques to help it work

• Mutual respect and a shared goal
• All about discipline - lost the ability to talk; people need to understand roles. On the other hand, Alistair Cockburn said "Discipline is a human emotive failure"
• Must be motivated self starter types for it to work at home (not everyone is)
• Can work well if previous relationships and community exist (e.g. Cincom hired all people they knew, but all over the world - part of the Smalltalk community)
• Team should hang out on constant chat channels
• Example: Used ichat to interview someone and turned over chat transcript to team
• Sometimes fully distributed teams are unimpacted by all the rumors and corporate politics that makes them more productive - is keeping it from them dishonest? Some people like not knowing, others feel very paranoid and left out. Don’t you tell me what I need to know or not
• Try to use phone more than email - increases communication bandwidth. Timezones are more of a problem.
• How bring people into a distributed team?

• More face to face contact at beginning
• Get more familiar with each other
• Better role definition
• Get them involved in pairing
• Somehow has to become part of what is happening
• Need to build familiarity and trust. Perhaps having them together at the beginning for a set time.

• Retrospectives - post partums meetings - after the project bring everyone in person to discuss what happened
• Everyone needs to be on the phone, even if they are co-located; otherwise there's a separation between the insiders and the outsiders
• Big difference between setting up specific distributed teams vs adding a few distributed members to a collocated team - those members feel like outsiders, disrespected
• Cross Atlantic project - thing that killed it was new people joining and not meeting the rest
• Agile processes - takes care of both the socialization and the discipline. Even in a distributed world - slight adjustment to practices - eg making the meetings cover more than high-level status - works. Call in each day, pairing up, constant online chat)
• Weekly video conference so much better for the whole team than a conf call for teams larger than 4 - in this case 2 teams - 2 rooms)
• Skype and netmeeting
• Need previous levels of shared culture and experience to make it work and bring people in
• People at home tend to put in more hours than people in an office. (often 2-6 hours more). Pair programming really encourages intense working practices - especially in a distributed world where you feel guilty for leaving the other person hanging while you take a break. (and cant keep the conversation going on the break to the break room eg)
• Standard meetings in distributed XP are longer to cover more, or keep an open IRC channel. In one company the open IRC channel was for gossip, work breaks, and they make a sub channel to do a specific piece of work. But IRC doesn’t follow you when you go get coffee.
• Would like a collective kitchen so when you go to yours with your headset, someone else could go to theirs and you still talk casually
• “Just because it’s a days work doesn’t mean it has to take more than an hour” Bruce’s son. Often much more productive at home, can get done in 4 hours what would take a day in the office.
• A long term distributed team develops its own culture and habits
• Technology works well if you have a team.