Anyway

Work­ing on remote, widely-distributed teams has its advant­ages (I can work from home in my base­ment, wear­ing whatever I feel like) but also, of course, its dis­ad­vant­ages. In par­tic­u­lar, when the team is work­ing against a hard dead­line, being sep­ar­ated means not able to gather in front of a white­board, or eas­ily meet to dis­cuss the prox­im­ate cause of some bug.

For the latest deadline-driven push to com­plete the test­ing and bug-fixing on time to deliver to the cli­ent, with a five-person team work­ing in timezones from East­ern Canada to Bris­bane, Aus­tralia (with a couple of us on Pacific time in the middle and the pro­ject man­ager on Chicago time), we star­ted a group chat using skype. Teams have done this for years, of course, using IRC, so the tech­nique isn’t new. Skype has the nice fea­ture that you can switch cli­ents (in my case from PC to Mac laptop to Android phone), and the chats auto­mat­ic­ally sync so you can catch up on what happened since you last logged on (in my case also answer ques­tions while sit­ting in a con­cert at my son’s school, or at the air­port). Yes, I’ve heard the con­cerns about secur­ity back doors with skype but the choice of chat sys­tem isn’t mine to make.

Seven days, 2351 lines, and 29964 words later, we shipped. Coordin­at­ing the test files, regres­sion test­ing, bug fixes, and doc­u­ment­a­tion updates with the com­pet­ing pro­jects, late nights, and timezone issues would have been much more dif­fi­cult with any other means of com­mu­nic­a­tion. Yes, the chat got con­fus­ing at times with vari­ous issues being dis­cussed sim­ul­tan­eously amongst the three of us who were most involved, and there was a cer­tain amount of “can you remind what that issue was about again”, but some of that was due to the late nights and dead­line pres­sure rather than the medium of communication.

And it was fun, more fun than email mes­sages. Chats are more imme­di­ate, less formal, we made each other laugh and wandered off topic at times, which doesn’t hap­pen much in email in a cor­por­ate set­ting. It’s some­how easier to write “well done!” or “I need cof­fee” or “can you explain that again” in a chat than email. And in some ways it’s almost easier than being in the same room with people. With the amount of work in a short time, and late nights/long days, tem­pers occa­sion­ally get short and irrit­a­tion rises. In a chat it’s easier to step away and not say some­thing you’ll regret later; easier to say “I need a break, I’m going for a walk” than if you’re in the same office as someone else work­ing on the same deadline.

Remote teams are often said to not be as pro­duct­ive as teams in the same office. After this exper­i­ence, I think some of that lack of pro­ductiv­ity is due to the people, and some to not fig­ur­ing out how best to use tools (even simple ones like chat) that are avail­able. Of course, every­one has to for­get their ego, and be pre­pared to say when they don’t under­stand or need more details (often easier in chat than face-to-face). And be under­stand­ing when things go wrong, while still work­ing to put them right again. A good pro­ject man­ager who knows when to keep out of the way and when to offer encour­age­ment also helps, thanks AM!