Large, complicated, and global teams

Working in teams can be hard. Now add lots of people to the mix. Now place them geographically all over the world. How should you handle it properly.

This is based on an actual situation.

First let’s describe the team:

1. Your largest client

2. Your project manager

3. Your coworkers

4. Third party company who developed a code base you are unfamiliar with

5. Third party company you manage who is doing development

Don’t forget you still have to manage:

1. Your other clients

Solution

So how do you handle it?

You have to make sure that everyone is doing the tasks that they are best at. The ability to identify people strengths will be critical to your success. It also doesn’t hurt to surround your self with great people.

Why was the project I worked on successful?

Over-communication

Time

Google calendar Working with people in 4 different timezones has it’s challenges. Google calendar is great for solving this problem. Zoom integrates with Google calendar for easy scheduling.

Text based communication

Slack. It’s name doesn’t do it justice. Slack isn’t just for slackers. It is actually for highly productive people. Slack is great for sharing knowledge with your coworkers. In my opinion, Slack is best used for internal communication. Code reviews, seeking assistance on a task, sharing best practices.

Video

Zoom. Slack has zoom integration which is great because every time I need to have a video conference with someone I just type /zoom. And there we go, instant face time. In a fully remote position it is nice to see your coworkers face to face.

Visualizing current progress

JIRA. This is a great tool. Now that I have been exposed to JIRA I can’t image working without it. The ability to visualize current progress and who is assigned what task. The ability to jump into a new task and see where it’s progress was left. We use Kanban boards in support mainly but for a recent site launch I was exposed to the sprint features.

I am learning new features of JIRA everyday. It is a complex tool that takes a bit of learning on how to configure properly but it is very flexible. It also has integration with GitHub and Harvest which is great for quickly getting to a PR (special branch naming convention) or seeing how much time has been put into a ticket.

To do list

Email. I use my email as my to do list. Once a task is complete I drag it out of my inbox and into my “Completed” folder.

Conclusion

You must over-communicate no matter what your role is in the project. Sharing knowledge helps everyone be successful. But, don’t be afraid to turn off all of your communication every once and a while to go heads down on a project and get your work done.