Software practitioners familiar with the rules of extreme programming know that moving people around, or the process of continually appointing team members to work on different parts of the solution or to serve in different team roles, can effectively shuttle knowledge between team members helping to ensure a common level of understanding in both the problem and solution domains.

Moving people around serves as a force that effectively destabilizes the team and continually engages them  towards establishing a new comfort zone.  In the process, team members cross-train towards improving their skills, are deterred from complacency, become more aware of project status, while becoming more responsive to project risk.  In this series, Moving People Around, I’ll discuss the challenges and opportunities that resulted from my own experience with a similar destabilizing force as I moved from a colocated team setting in New York City, to a teleworking setting in Buenos Aires, Argentina.   I’ll discuss how our team overcame the resulting challenges and amplified the opportunities towards ensuring the successful delivery of our software projects.

Surging Ahead

Prior to my moving, our team was composed of 4 members, 3 superb programmers and 1 tech lead/hands-on project manager (me).   Our efforts were focused on delivering a .NET analytics platform which was in beta release.

We regularly incorporated agile software development practices including frequent software deliverable, daily meetings, daily interaction between business people and developers, continuous integration, no overtime, refactoring, and face-to-face team conversations.

Following the move it was clear that we had also improved our practice of collective code ownership while becoming better at moving people around.  We lost the benefits that come with face-to-face team conversations but overall our system had matured into a  production release and we signed our first customer.

The immediate impact following my move was surprising.  In these first few months, we experienced a team surge that saw us sprinting through 4 development iterations, invigorating the project and more importantly, introducing breakthrough features that singled out the product in the marketplace.

I believe this surge was directly related to positive effects that resulted from my move to a teleworking environment and I wonder whether the same intensity could have been achieved had the move not occurred.   The catalyst behind this surge included:

• Eliminating commute time gave me more time to focus on developing the product.
• The team raised its performance level in order to prove effectiveness in a virtual team setting.
• Three hour timezone difference allowed us to benefit from “Follow the Sun” development.
• Daily group chat sessions eased the recalcitrance and shyness that sometimes occurred in face-to-face conversations, empowering all members to speak up.  The result was continuous feedback that improved our team-intimacy, awareness to project risk and productivity.

Counter Balancing

After this initial surge and as the year progressed, some of the challenges facing teleworkers and virtual teams began to set in, specifically team intimacy began to suffer as the lack of face-to-face meetings, coupled with the transition of part of the team to separate projects began to disconnect and disorient us all.

To counter these effects, we:

• Introduced a weekly meeting with business leads.
• Transitioned my original role as tech lead to a colocated member, allowing me to better focus on clearing obstacles that were preventing colocated members from maximizing their productivity and brilliance.
• Increased my visits to the office.
• Decreased project velocity to achieve a more sustainable pace.

Subtle adjustments also helped counter the effects of my moving to a remote work environment.   For example, I could sense a collective relief from business leads (as well as increased call volumes) once my Argentine ring tone was changed to sound like the standard USA ring tone.

Conclusion

Looking back, I do believe the initial team surge was directly related to the benefits agile promotes in moving people around.   The intensity of this surge was largely a result of our response to the changing circumstances.   As challenges arose, it was critical to address each quickly and decisively.  In my new role as a teleworker, I can confirm the importance of continually reaching out to all stakeholders, make them feel comfortable that you are accessible during their work hours.  The move to a teleworking environment also gave me time to focus exclusively on writing code while transitioning my role as tech lead to a colocated member.  In the process we improved our practice of collective code ownership.

While this move served as an extreme case of the challenges and opportunities that result when you move people around, more traditional examples more would show team members owning different portions of the system or  fulfilling different team roles at different times in the development lifecycle.   When effectively managed, the benefits will be distributed across individuals, their team and the stakeholders they serve.

This concludes the series Moving People Around.

The list of challenges facing teleworkers are rooted in three dimensions. First is the reality that he or she may have too little or too much of the discipline it takes to be effective in a remote setting. For example, the teleworker may not be effective in isolation from the team, or may work doubly hard to prove their effectiveness. The second dimension is the perception from collocated team members that the teleworker has a desirable and enviable position.  Here we see effectiveness and accomplishments of the teleworker being diminished by any lingering resentment from team members not in a position to telework themselves. The third dimension of challenges facing teleworking professionals is the reality that collaborating and ensuring unambiguous interpretation across geographic boundaries, cultures and timezones is just plain difficult.

With that in mind, the challenges facing the teleworker include:

• Work/Life Balance
• Trust
• Envy
• Team Intimacy
• Visibility
• Effectiveness

Work/Life Balance

Depending on the characteristics of the work and team, teleworkers may find it difficult to draw clear lines between their personal and professional lives. First, teleworkers may try to overproduce in order to prove their worth and effectiveness, or may simply need to work more in order to overcome any ineffectiveness resulting from their remoteness from the team. In cases where the teleworker is a member of a virtual team, where members may span timezone and countries, teleworkers may be tempted to work the timezone of the team members they want to impress the most. These tendencies lead to longer hours at the computer, and the blurring of the line that divides professional and personal life.

Trust

The level of trust in any relationship can determine its growth potential. The same goes for the relationship between a teleworker and his team. Depending on team dynamics, prolonged periods without face-to-face communication will have an adverse effect on trust. Teleworkers should schedule recurring face-to-face meetings between themselves and other team members, preferably in person meetings, however video conferencing can serve as a effective alternative.

The quality of a teleworker’s performance and deliverables will impact the level of trust between them and the rest of the team. Repeatedly missing deadlines, not following what was asked of them, or in general producing low-quality deliverables will erode the trust of others.

Envy

Virtual teams composed of a mix between colocated members and teleworkers will most likely experience envy or resentment directed towards teleworkers. This is a natural consequence resulting from the effort colocated members expend to be physically present with customers, project stakeholders, and fellow employees on a daily basis, and the general lack of such effort from teleworking professionals. These sentiments can begin to erode Trust unless teleworkers continuously prove their value to their team.

Team Intimacy

By team intimacy I mean the level of concern member feels to one-another’s professional needs.  Intimacy can be a critical element towards ensuring the success for any project as it helps build trust. A teleworker may struggle to find the required level of intimacy with his or her team and must therefore make a conscious and creative effort to consistently reach out through voice, video and chat technologies.

Visibility

The old adage “Out of sight, out of mind” can apply to teleworkers as well.  Even highly-effective teleworkers who would otherwise be the goto person in a colocated settings, can be forgotten once they find themselves in a teleworking arrangement. If the teleworker has a clear specialization, his or her visibility to other team members will probably remain high. If instead the teleworker has a less specialized skillset, visibility will suffer as managers and other team members rely on skills from colocated colleagues first. Timezone differences can further complicate the teleworker’s Work/Life Balance as he or she attempts to increase visibility by adjusting to the traditional working hours of colocated colleagues.

Effectiveness

The absence of commute time and common office distractions can cause a teleworker to be significantly more productive when compared to a colocated colleague. The challenge is having the required Trust, and Visibility from other team members to ensure a steady stream of work as well as the open communication channels to ensure continuous feedback for the task at hand while helping boost effectiveness.

The list of challenges facing virtual teams:

• Language Barriers
• Trust
• Team Intimacy
• Cultural Differences
• Differences in Communication Styles
• Orchestrating Across Timezones
• Effective Work Distribution
• Effective Productivity Tracking

Language Barriers

Years ago, a team of us worked on building a content management system. The team consisted of a group of programmers from four different countries.  The code was difficult to maintain because a few of the programmers adopted a variable naming convention using their mother tongue, while others used English.

In other experiences, I found language barriers between virtual team members slowed the pace of communication, and generally resulted in reticence from key individuals.   In particular, I remember a project where some team members were forced to switch language, away from their mother tongue.  This completely changed the overall team dynamic.  Prior to the switch, individuals spoke up, were proactive in addressing project issues, and were generally more engaged in their day-to-day work.  Forced to speak English and their engagement and banter dropped.  The preferred Communication Style shifted from vibrant real time communication technologies to asynchronous technologies such as email. All told, the language barriers had a significant negative impact, especially to the team’s Trust.

In globally distributed virtual teams there’s a good chance team members will have differing proficiency levels in the spoken language of choice.  The resulting Language Barriers will need to be managed to prevent negative consequences to the teams performance.

Trust

The distributed nature of virtual teams also complicates the process of building and maintaining professional trust.  The old adage, “Out of sight, out of mind” applies, as the team struggles in their remote settings to build necessary levels of trust.  To offset the ensuing challenges, teams should rely on occasional face-to-face meetings, while ensuring the geographic locations of all team members are fairly considered when scheduling in person team meetings.

Update August 1, 2010 – ODesk – the marketplace for online work teams developed a software application called ODesk Team. What’s particularly interesting about this application are the innovative features it offers to help build trust between the buyer and seller.  Features such as Time Tracker and Screensnap, which are arguably intrusive, can be effective at building trust between parties who are working together for the first time.

Team Intimacy

Intimacy is a good indicator to the strength and health of any relationship including those in a virtual team.  In this context, intimacy refers to the level of caring team members feel for one another’s needs.  The distributed nature of virtual team members will make it difficult for them to grow and sustain high levels of professional intimacy.  Members, who are naturally empathetic and proactive in reaching out to others, may lack the necessary communication and feedback channels, in a remote setting,  that help spring them to action.  This will ultimately impact the team’s Trust and overall performance.

Cultural Differences

Coming from New York City where working lunches are a normal part of any work day, I didn’t anticipate what came from working through a lunch for a project in Rome, Italy. This was perceived by fellow team members as an act of competitiveness and ultimately required many group trips to the espresso machine to reestablish the Trust between us all.

Cultural issues are more pronounced in globally distributed teams. Learning and adapting to the various cultural traits of virtual team members will help grow the team’s trust and intimacy, while not losing focus on the universal business culture of satisfying customer demands.

Differences in Communication Styles

Synchronous communication technologies, such as chat, may be favored when distributed team members share command of the same spoken language.  Asynchronous communication technologies, such as email, may instead be favored when distributed team members are lacking this command.  Asynchronous technologies will permit them more time to process and translate messages. The key is to identify and select those technologies appropriate to the team as I talked about in my own move to a virtual team.

The April 24, 2008 New York Times article on making long-distance business partnerships work confirms the importance of selecting the right technologies whle managing the privacy issues that may arise from their use.

The July 30, 2010 CNN.com article on telepresence robots hints at a new technology just around the corner that may just promote a new level of  communication between team members.

Orchestrating Across Timezones

Virtual team members situated in different timezones presents both challenges and opportunities.   The benefits of multiple time zones are best captured by the expression “follow the sun”, which implies a virtual team structure that permits continuous productivity through the seamless handoff of work between team members who are leaving for the day, and those coming online. Despite the challenges different timezones bring, the ability to orchestrate this handoff can have many benefits and will allow team members to work the traditional working hours of their timezone.

On a recent project,  for example, a colleague lived and worked in a timezone that was eight hours ahead of our colocated team.  We struggled with the timezone difference.  In particular we made the mistake of leaving some of his questions unanswered at the end of our workday.  This resulted in nearly a day of lost productivity as his workday started without the answers he needed to move forward.

Effective Work Distribution

The “out of sight, out of mind” adage described in the previous section on Trust, can also impact the effective distribution of work across virtual team members.  Peter Drucker described the job of a manager as one who creates productive work and assigns the most effective people to perform it but the remoteness of virtual teams may make it difficult to understand a team member’s effectiveness.  Managers must find new ways to understand worker effectiveness while ensuring the work is distributed evenly, fairly and avoids overworking virtual team members.

Effective Productivity Tracking

The level of productivity tracking needed in a virtual team will depend on the level of trust between it’s members.  Effective virtual teams who’ve built a solid foundation of trust and effectiveness won’t need to confront this challenge.  In teams where members are working together for the first time and are under pressure to deliver fast, closely monitoring productivity may be the only way to mitigate risk while building trust.  As I mentioned in the section on Trust, ODesk has introduced a software application called ODesk Team, which, in this context of productivity tracking, includes a feature to capture hourly screenshots of the contractor’s work.  While this feature would be unquestionably demotivating in high-performance teams, for some virtual teams, it might just provide the right level of transparency.

The WSJ’s Ron Winslow cites IBM as having found the right formula for assembling productive virtual teams.

This formula can be generalized for organizations of all sizes not just IBM. What are the challenges facing virtual teams? How can these challenges be conquered through combinations of discipline and technology? As Ron Winslow points out, challenges include:

1. Cultural barriers
2. Trust barriers
3. Work Distribution
4. Language Barriers
5. Productivity Tracking

Technologies help conquer these problems:

1. Video Conferencing
2. Presence management with ubiquitous messaging
3. Collaboration tools (i.e. Sharepoint/Wikis)
4. Continuous progress tracking (i.e. Cruise Control)
5. (Update August 2010) Telepresence robot

Discipline techniques to overcome challenges:

1. Using in-person meetings, when possible, to build trust
2. Setting common understanding and ground rules at project start

Some thoughts regarding these technology and discipline solutions:

Because of shifting timezones, virtual teams can schedule around 24 hour work schedules. To fully take advantage of this, it’s important that the hand-off between team members going offline and those coming online is seamless and efficient. Continuous progress tracking tools can enhance this handoff by ensuring team members coming online are not reacting to stale information.

Presence management is tricky. Virtual team members will probably need to configure presence management in such a way so communication between all team members has minimal impact on their personal life. However, the reality with shifting timezones is that for all team members coming online, there are team members going offline and into their personal lives. Virtual teams can use presence management to configure the overlapping time windows where team members in multiple timezones are all available.

Video Conferencing helps increase team intimacy. With better intimacy, teams will have more trust which will hopefully result in more open communication.

Collaboration tools represent the distributed canvas where virtual teams apply and implement their ideas. Coupled with version tracking, which draws traceability between changes, the effectiveness of these tools can directly affect the productivity of the team.

Setting ground rules and common understanding at project start is easier then ensuring they are respected through the course of the project lifecycle. Technology must be able to enforce the desired ground rules, and open communication with all team members can ensure common understanding.

What challenges have you experienced with virtual teams? How have you solved these challenges? What are some of the future challenges that will impact virtual teams?