I've been playing around with this for a little while now. I've tried all three approaches so far. The first two failed miserably (I take the blame for most of it, transitioning from a programmer to a leader/manager isn't as trivial as I initially thought).
The distributed model seems to be working the best. We are a truly distributed company. I felt kind'o self conscious when someone would ask where our offices are. But now, I realize, we get stuff done! The team just works, and works far more efficiently than any team I've been part of before.
Granted, 10 out of 12 of us are introverts. I think there's something even better at work. Everyone shows up and does what needs to be done when it's convenient for them, we don't really have "politics" since nobody spends a significant amount of time chitchatting by the proverbial "watercooler" etc.
It's really a very unique culture. We're far apart, but we know each other thru our work and we take quite a bit of pride in our work. There are several serious shortcomings though.
So far, I haven't seen a tool that was quite up to the task of keeping the team cohesive as one unified team.
We started out using Trello (which I still think is amazing), but as we grew to past 5 people and multiple projects, trello quickly became a mess (maybe due to how we're using it). We do rely heavily on skype and dropbox.
We recently switched to TeamLab, which is pretty awesome given all the features,but it's still not right...
I wish I could just extend trello, add some wiki/blogging functionality to it and drastically improve the search.
So, I'm contending that there probably isn't any tool out there specifically directed at a distributed teams. If there's one out there that works well for you, please share... At this point we've decided to roll our own given the time and collective energy we're already spent trying to learn and implement some of the existing tools.
(BTW, our team's not specifically developers, we range from business types to designers, writers and Coders)
To be honest being out of band isn't too bad, we've always got someone working around the clock, so it feels like we're always moving along.
It isn't a project management tool (lots of good ones already exist), but it is a great discussion tool. Our remote team is closer together because of it.
If you try it out, we'd love to hear your thoughts, [email protected].
The distributed model seems to be working the best. We are a truly distributed company. I felt kind'o self conscious when someone would ask where our offices are. But now, I realize, we get stuff done! The team just works, and works far more efficiently than any team I've been part of before.
Granted, 10 out of 12 of us are introverts. I think there's something even better at work. Everyone shows up and does what needs to be done when it's convenient for them, we don't really have "politics" since nobody spends a significant amount of time chitchatting by the proverbial "watercooler" etc.
It's really a very unique culture. We're far apart, but we know each other thru our work and we take quite a bit of pride in our work. There are several serious shortcomings though.
So far, I haven't seen a tool that was quite up to the task of keeping the team cohesive as one unified team.
We started out using Trello (which I still think is amazing), but as we grew to past 5 people and multiple projects, trello quickly became a mess (maybe due to how we're using it). We do rely heavily on skype and dropbox.
We recently switched to TeamLab, which is pretty awesome given all the features,but it's still not right...
I wish I could just extend trello, add some wiki/blogging functionality to it and drastically improve the search.
So, I'm contending that there probably isn't any tool out there specifically directed at a distributed teams. If there's one out there that works well for you, please share... At this point we've decided to roll our own given the time and collective energy we're already spent trying to learn and implement some of the existing tools.
(BTW, our team's not specifically developers, we range from business types to designers, writers and Coders)
To be honest being out of band isn't too bad, we've always got someone working around the clock, so it feels like we're always moving along.