How and Why a Co-Located Team Can Work

And you need to think in a different way about building trust and strong bonds between team members and how to keep them. The leader’s task is to determine what the team needs to outperform. If co-location is best for the team, the leader must provide the team’s environment.

As an Agile Coach, I’ve been an advocate for co-located teams for the last 10 years. In previous posts, I’ve argued hard against the popular convention of using distributed teams. This includeswhy you should not use Scrum with your distributed team, and howagile transformations can be derailed by lack of co-location. After finishing the book Deep Work by Cal Newport, I’m beginning to rethink my position. Are there some types of projects for which “virtual teams” are inappropriate?

Alcor’s recruitment solution allows western IT companies to expand their business capabilities by choosing either the distributed or co-located team model. Thanks to our fast and effective recruitment, our clients get a dedicated team of developers from Eastern Europe and retain full control over their expenses and team management. Alcor can also cover operational functions to ensure uninterrupted running of the offshore team. It goes without saying that successful performance is possible only when there is mutual trust and respect between the team members. One of the ways to develop these traits is to assign projects with shared responsibilities that presuppose regular meetings.

How and Why a Co-Located Team Can Work

Can also be reinforced with the usage of various agile tools. But even more troubling to me after reading Deep Work is the inability of people on those co-located teams to have time for interruption-free thinking. Cal contends in his book that interruptions and distractions inhibit the concentration needed to solve challenging problems or create innovative solutions. This directly conflicts with the idea of co-locating teams.

• However, by bringing distributed teams onboard, Agile principles can be easily maintained due to a variety of approaches to manage the distance between you and developers.
• We were much smaller than Yahoo at the time, but had been an extremely remote friendly organization up to that point.
• However, I found myself in a team setup that was not exactly what I was dreaming of.
• Our Agile Training courses help teams boost productivity, optimize their development process, and deliver better customer solutions.
• It only provides opportunities for open communication, trust, and knowledge sharing.
• The key fact is that bridging the distance with tools is critical.

Although we are all remote, because of these planned meetings, we do not feel that disconnected from each other. But he also recognizes that he is influenced by his own experience. His generation was not born into a world in clouds and containers technology, Slack, GitHub and a myriad of other tools and platforms that can be accessed from anywhere.

Satellite Workers

While working co-allocated the most important for me is not being interrupted when I’m doing programming. When this is manageable and people in the office treat your time with respect, my productivity is extremely high. The superb benefit I get when working together in the same office is honest and constractive feedback about my work. This helps me grow as a team player, gives opportunity to discover how to be useful for peers, learn from them and serve them. In my previous distributed team, one of the colleagues wanted to introduceBehaviour Driven Development concept to the team and change the way how we formulated requirements and wrote tests. Not all of them were present on that meeting, so some of them didn’t understand why they had to switch to it.

Plan on equipping conference rooms in the main offices with communication equipment like SMART boards and monitors. Additionally, the business needs to have a strong, reliable Internet provider. All things security for software engineering, DevOps, and IT Ops teams. Stay out front on application security, information security and data security. But regardless of where someone physically sits, if someone does not perform, I do not think an office environment will significantly improve their performance. Yes, you can look over their shoulder and keep track of coffee breaks, but then you need to question whether you want team members like this in the first place.

Additionally, you can bring visuals to the team space or office and stick them on the walls so that everyone will remember them every day. No one can “hide” behind a “bad internet connection” or turn off their camera. Strong visions and clear goals are essential to succeed as a team, regardless of whether the team works remotely, at one location, or somewhere in between.

What are the 4 fundamental roles in a virtual group?

Zapier has been a remote company since its founding in 2011. It has literally written abook about the subject as well. For those unfamiliar with the company, it allows a user to easily connect apps together to automate processes or accomplish any number of tasks.

Gathering a group of people with the right skills in a room and calling it a “team space” doesn’t necessarily make them a team. The result of a good team is not just the sum of all the skills—it is much more. People don’t just bring their professional skills to a team. They also use their individual superpowers to help the whole team grow and make the magic happen. Superpowers are each person’s unique traits that help them interact, solve problems, and make decisions, among other things. These traits are not tied to our professional background or experience.

My experience with remote teams

If teams need to access sensitive data, put in place the proper controls so that this data cannot be copied or downloaded. 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.

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. Remote work attracts a https://globalcloudteam.com/ certain type of person who tends to be self-motivated and independent. Remote employees naturally have less oversight and management than employees in an office setting, so in order to be successful they must be self-motivated and independent.

These companies claim that being fully-virtual brings them the same level of success and productivity as if they had fully-collocated teams. With the vibrant approaches to managing remote teams, they discovered that distributed teams aligned with Agile principles bring the best results. The software development process can be handled by collocated (in-house) or distributed . Regarding Agile-driven projects, both types can perform the tasks of project execution with its advantages and disadvantages. There are dozens of challenges that can be faced by a client no matter if it’s agile colocation practice, or agile in distributed teams. Both teams require proper management in terms of communication, progress tracking, timely delivery, and quality.

However, these efficiencies are best reaped if work can be split across location, rather than having everyone pooled onto one task. It helped with morale, but impacted productivity even with simple things like a 3 hour time difference. With intentional leadership and design, we can create high performing how to build culture in a remote team distributed teams. As we’ve seen from the research and the examples above, the limiting factors to remote work are often in the effort put in rather than inherent in the nature of the team. For teams to reach this level of communication and effectiveness, they need appropriate training and support.

What are the pros and cons of a virtual team?

The hub was the place where best practices were formulated and applied, better ways of working created, cross-project knowledge was shared. If we can name the location where the life was happening, it was clearly that hub. Our team members from that hub were the ones more smiling on our calls, had some internal jokes we couldn’t understand and they actually did work more than us, because they were in the right place to do it. It was much easier for them to approach a senior web developer who sat across the hall, than for a developer in another US location, via a Slack call.

What is the difference between co-located development and distributed development?

You may not need as strong leadership or as many tools to make co-located teams effective. The effort to communicate can be smaller and the amount of time to bridge some of the distance can potentially be shortened. But let’s stop claiming that one outperforms the other. In the case with product teams, I’ve seen the idea of “good documentation” take the place of conversations.

Two other team members were primarily remote, and everyone else on the team was partially remote on any given day. As the product manager, I shifted my mindset from an “in-office” focus to a remote focus. Even being in the office, we utilized the tools for effective collaboration across the entire group. It gave everyone the chance to either be present physically or dial in, whether from their desk down the hall or from their office across the country. 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.

Why Remote Workers Are More Productive Than Co-Located Teams

Critics often say that there is nothing as effective as face-to-face communication between team members, to which I would say, you’re right! But what they do not recognize is that different activities may have distinctly effective forms of communication, just like different people have different communication styles. 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. As described in thisHBR article, there are numerous lessons from Automattic, as well as some very compelling reasons why remote work has worked so well for them. Creativity thrives online, and allowing people to find the best way to work allows them to be far more creative than they might be otherwise. That means allowing employees to work when they are most productive, and from wherever they are most productive.

At their corporate headquarters, McDonalds has done away with dedicated desks so anybody can pretty much sit anywhere they want. One of the old arguments against allowing employees to work remotely was that it makes it harder to communicate and collaborate. That may have been true once, but in this day and age it simply isn’t an issue. There is so much technology at our fingertips that make the ability to communicate remotely a non-issue.

Most popular one was waterfall, however, those who engaged in Agile claimed to obtain more quality and productivity during the project execution. The software development in Agile can be performed by either collocated teams or distributed. Scrum, Agile Modelling and Crystal Clear are some of the most widely used methods. We will compare and contrast how a collocated team and distributed software development work with Agile methodology applied. Effective communication, like productivity metrics, must be established, agreed upon and documented when beginning any project. Failure in team communication and misalignment can occur when people sit next to each other in a shared space.