Benefits of Co-Located Teams: Do You Really Need to Work Together?

Just like in pair-­‐programming while coding, for group conversations to happen around an electronic tool, there needs to be a driver. Another drawback we found was that as we added tools, as few as just one more, there was overlap to where things would go. So we had to have a short conversation around where to put things. We’ll talk about that at the end when we talk about it all coming together. If you like where u live, if your family lives there, if your family member is sick and you want to be there, there may be many reasons… And these are just employee side, where remote work can make life easier.

• This is the most effective communication compared to writing a message on a piece of paper.
• How easy is it to try out new things or new technology in a co-located team?
• I was looking for new projects on freelance portals and had my own network of programmers in Ukraine.
• Many teams that begin using Agile techniques toss out diagramming, and that’s a big loss.
• This allows the team to rely on face-to-face communication and enables two other forms of information sharing.
• Alcor’s recruitment solution allows western IT companies to expand their business capabilities by choosing either the distributed or co-located team model.

The web is a universal functionality delivery platform, it works everywhere, on most every device and O/S. People have to be able to walk into the team room and start working with the tool with a minimum of fuss. That means no trials, no credit cards, no lengthy sign-­‐up pages.

He cites the ability to interact with another to co-create, particularly at whiteboards, that sounded very much like what we expect from agile teams. Co-located teams can’t take advantage of lower people costs like distributed teams. Nor can they accommodate those with virtual offices, or individuals working from home. You select team leaders/managers for their ability to trust, respect and empower others. Thus, ‘good’ management is more important in dispersed teams than co-located ones.

How to Manage Global Teams: Co-located vs Distributed Teams in Agile

Even though we still used virtual tools, we quickly saw a split between information-haves, who had the benefit of informal “watercooler” conversations, and information have-nots. Pulling the entire team together three times a year was not enough to compensate. Shared understanding is a key measure of communication effectiveness, especially on distributed teams. Reaching and maintaining shared understanding is critical, both perceived shared understanding as well asactualshared understanding. Today, many IT organizations prefer distributed teams to cut down their expenditure and efforts. However, there is a large section of industry that prefers to manage colocated teams for certain areas of their project.

The downside to the single-site model is recruiting and retention. If you are outside of the major tech hubs, the talent pools are so small that your growth options are really limited. However, within the https://globalcloudteam.com/ major hubs, there is fierce competition across employers for the same talent. This will loosen if there is a tech downturn, but it has certainly been a brutal recruiting environment for the last 5 years.

Promotion of mutual trust and respect

Pushing the team to bring most communication onto digital tools, whether chat, longer-form interactions like Jotto, video-conferencing, shared documents, etc. will make this easier. It would seem that co-located teams may generally perform better because they take the path of less-resistance. There is more room for mistakes when everyone is together in an office.

Once the epics and stories are written and assigned to sprints, most of the activity a team engages in is implementation. An interruption-free environment is vital for maintaining the deep focus required to perform the majority of these tasks. When choosing an outsourced solution, there are different options for how teams will be distributed geographically. There is a certain amount of effort that has to be put forward to build teams, whether they are sitting together or are distributed across the globe. Without that effort, the perceived distance between folks will be large, and thus the performance of the team will suffer. Whether it is a remote team or a co-located team, achieving a shared understanding is critical.

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Teams larger than 10 to 12 people have a difficult time maintaining face-to-face communication as the primary way of sharing information. A caves-and-common approach to balancing collaborative and private space. Commons are areas maximized for osmotic communication, while caves are organized to give people a private space. Put performance engineering into practicewith thesetop 10 performance engineering techniques that work. Provide phones and headphones that work with the network system and can be heard as clearly as possible. Plan on equipping conference rooms in the main offices with communication equipment like SMART boards and monitors.

The tools that teams have access to are also very important in their ability to communicate, work on tasks, and reach a shared understanding. It has to do with the team members, the team culture, the technology, and the processes employed by the group. Distributed team works remotely from different locations, which boosts their productivity. Such a team model offers access to a wide pool of IT talents, substantial cost savings and opportunities for rapid business growth.

This has been proven wrong by various studies that have determined employees who work in an office setting are the ones who face more distractions. 8 hours in an office does not translate to 8 hours of work; and I’m speaking from personal experience! Remote workers don’t get burned out the same way as office employees who are stuck behind a desk for 8+ hours a day. They work when there is work that needs to be done, often totally on their own schedule, and from where they feel most comfortable and productive. This freedom allows remote workers to shape their work days in whatever way makes the most sense for them and allows them to get the most done, without being tied to a strict office schedule. In my previous distributed team, one of the colleagues wanted to introduce Behaviour Driven Development concept to the team and change the way how we formulated requirements and wrote tests.

Advantages of Team Collocation

In this model, all team members work from different locations. The sites can also change without making a difference in work and success. Co-location is optimal for agile working, making it easy to be creative, think together, and use visualizations to align on the same goal.

While nobody has time for meetings, everybody likes to browse videos at their leisure. As I was ending my engagement with this group, they were talking about keeping these demo videos in a library for each of their clients alongside some stock footage of the development team working. When contract renewal time rolled around, the idea was that they could create a mash-­‐up of the team working alongside the finished product being demoed to a happy audience and use this as a sales tool.

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If someone says something interesting, we may perk up and join the conversation. Communication is the lifeblood of any successful agile team. And osmotic communication makes certain that the whole team maintains a useful level of awareness about issues and developments. But is colocation necessary when it comes to agile teams? Not only is it possible to effectively manage distributed agile teams but there are many benefits. People form relationships and bonds that improve motivation and collaboration.

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InVision is a prime example of a company that built remote work into their ethos from the beginning, and then transitioned to being fully distributed as they grew. We often took time to call other team members regularly, even just to chat. This mirrored the kind of discussions that often happen sitting together.

For most software development and testing tasks, I have found that obfuscating and creating sample data sets often removes any real need to access sensitive data. The task board is a widely used tool which helps to organize workflow and boost the performance of co-located teams. With the help of a task board, it’s possible to identify the objectives, goals, accountabilities, timelines, and materials of the software development project. Moreover, it’s easier to implement progress tracking and address emerging issues.

When I left the team, they had a full-­‐time large monitor dedicated to keeping their tasks up, but the prospects of it staying that way were dubious at best because of other organizational priorities. Hangouts have several key features which took our demo to the next level of awesome. First, they are multi-­‐ point video conferencing with screen sharing. This means that each participant controls whatever video they want to send to the rest of the group. They can show a running app, a video they recorded, or step the audience through a regular demo from their browser. Second, the hangout creator acts as Master-­‐of-­‐Ceremonies, switching from participant to participant to control what is being shown.

The missing factor may actually be the idea of psychological proximity, which takes into account all the aspects of proximity for a team. The key conclusion was that leaders must assist the team in bridging the distances. It took a different kind of leadership to make this happen on the teams, and ultimately took effort from leaders and how to build culture in a remote team team members to be effective. I had a similar experience several years ago at a company I worked for when a new executive came on board. After a short period of time, he introduced a similar policy to the one above. We were much smaller than Yahoo at the time, but had been an extremely remote friendly organization up to that point.

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Our final team is the same Virginia team that tried using Google Hangout. Over the few years they have been in business, they tried several products for project documentation. They found that most tools had too many features for what they needed and there was a revolt against the existing toolset. Our fifth team is a small part of a multi-­‐national telecommunications company.

At their corporate headquarters, McDonalds has done away with dedicated desks so anybody can pretty much sit anywhere they want. For the same reason, downloaded clients are a bad idea. Not only are they highly-­‐client O/S specific, downloaded apps are updated less often than online versions.

Similarly, any sort of structure in an online tool is easily confused in the user’s mind with a template that must be completed. Even though Trello was chosen because of its simplicity, we found that some teams want to add information to story cards that doesn’t appear on the face of the card in the app. It seems that the physical pencil and paper will never be replaced by an online app -­‐-­‐ the minute you start automating something you begin to place implied constraints on how it can be used or configured.