distributed team management: pitfall, challenges and advantages

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16th – 19th February 2017 Davos, Switzerland drupalmountaincamp.ch DISTRIBUTED TEAM MANAGEMENT: PITFALL, CHALLENGES AND ADVANTAGES EUGENIO MINARDI

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Page 1: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

16th – 19th February 2017Davos, Switzerlanddrupalmountaincamp.ch

DISTRIBUTED TEAM MANAGEMENT: PITFALL, CHALLENGES AND

ADVANTAGESEUGENIO MINARDI

Page 2: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS

Social event Sponsor

Individual Sponsor Fabian Dennler

Website Hosting provided byContribution Sponsor

Page 3: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

WHO I AM

Page 4: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

CTO at

[email protected]

@kmox83

EUGENIO MINARDI

Page 5: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

SOME CONTEXT

• Ibuildings is a dutch company which started in 1999

• based on open source products, mainly PHP

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MY BEGINNINGS

• What was I doing in 1999?

• At that time my working environment used to be Windows 98, programming with ASP or Visual Basic

• The team I used to work in was composed by 2 or 3 people

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MY BEGINNINGS

• Every person of the team was working independently on his own project

• There were few interactions, some part of the programs could come across, but each person was leading his own work

• The coding was organised in libraries (and include files), there was no versioning

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FEW YEARS LATER

• In 2002/2003 I started working with open source software

• I had my first experience of work outsourcing

• Still at the collocated office we were few people but working independently

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FIRST PRODUCT AND TEAM

• From 2003 till 2006 I did freelancing, I have been project lead but mostly take caro of one man projects

• In 2006 I started my first experience in a more structured project

• Here I could learn the project phases, the roles and relations with the stakeholders

• More actors involved, more complexity to manage

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• In 2008 I started with a more structured work joining an organisation

• People working in teams

• Tools for management and for versioning

• Tools for communication

• Collocated

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IBUILDINGS2013

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IBUILDINGS

• When I joined in 2013, Ibuildings was just starting on the Italian market

• Independent from the Dutch branch, but with their backing and support

• It started with few people, each one hundreds kilometres apart from the other

• Here started the challenge of managing a distributed workforce

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DEFINITIONSDISTRIBUTED TEAM/WORKFORCE

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DISTRIBUTED WORKFORCE DEFINITION

A distributed workforce is a workforce that reaches beyond the restrictions of a traditional office environment. A distributed workforce is dispersed geographically over a wide area – domestically or internationally. By installing key technologies, distributed companies enable employees located anywhere to access all of the company’s resources and software such as applications, data and e-mail without working within the confines of a physical company-operated facility.Wikipedia [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_workforce]

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DISTRIBUTED WORKFORCE

• People (constitute the team)

• Technology (enables the work and communication)

• Different locations are involved

• Operating on the same set of things

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CHALLENGESHere come the

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BUILD THE RIGHT TEAM

• PEOPLE is the main asset, the most important thing

• Traditional methods of hiring do not work

• We have first to measure the compatibility with our culture

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BUILD THE RIGHT TEAM

…when it comes to distributed team PERSONALITY AND MOTIVATION MATTERS MORE THAN MERE TALENT

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BUILD THE RIGHT TEAM

The following are characteristics that a person should have to fit in a distributed team

Page 20: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

RIGHT PEOPLE MEANS

Talented people

it is still a crucial aspect, people must have the talent for what they are hired

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RIGHT PEOPLE MEANS

Not arrogant nor opinionated

in a community you don’t want to put yourself in front of the others and obscure them

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RIGHT PEOPLE MEANS

Social with sense of humor

Page 23: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

RIGHT PEOPLE MEANS

Autonomous

Problem solving skills, information discovery/retrieval

Page 24: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

RIGHT PEOPLE MEANS

Collaborative and Helpful

the right people for your distributed team want to help the other team member and want to share their own knowledge

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RIGHT PEOPLE MEANS

Curious and self-starting

I want to know what I am doing, I want a deeper understanding of the things.Good remote workers also set goals for themselves and for their team members

If they are not curious nor self-starting it is most likely that the will depend on someone else

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RIGHT PEOPLE MEANS

Communicative

A person should have good communication skill, especially written

The major part of the communication will be in written form, the lack of communicativeness may lead to serious problems. If I cannot express myself I cannot communicate my needs

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RIGHT PEOPLE MEANS

Energetic and motivated

A person should bring good energy, should be positive as much as possible

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RIGHT PEOPLE MEANS

Confidence

A person should be able to get in confidence with the other member of the team

It is good to maintain the communication also for non-work related topic

For this we set up a telegram channel were anyone can share a moment of his day or can start a frivolous chat

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RIGHT PEOPLE MEANS• Talented

• Not arrogant nor opinionated

• Social with sense of humor

• Autonomous

• Collaborative and Helpful

• Curious and self-starting

• Communicative

• Results/Objective-driven

• Energetic

• Possible Confidence

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Do you believe that with the right training, support and time anyone would be suitable for

a distributed team?

QA

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RIGHT PEOPLE, RIGHT JOB

Albert Einstein wrote,

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid"

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RIGHT PEOPLE, RIGHT JOB

Albert Einstein wrote,

"Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid”

This is is also true for the soft skills

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RIGHT PEOPLE, RIGHT JOB

Managing a distributed team won’t work for every type of business, nor for every type of person.

If you can say:“The way I work isn’t much different than how I would work if I was at home”

Probably your job is right for distributed work

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RIGHT PEOPLE, RIGHT JOB

When hiring a new people we follow the proposition:

“it doesn’t make sense to hire smart people and tell them what to do; we hire smart people so they can tell us what to do”

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TEAMSFeeding and nurturing the

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GIVE SUPPORT

• Remote workers in some cases may need to be guided

• There is a chance that they would feel lost or lonely

• People need somebody to look at for inspiration

• Everyone needs a mentor. Everyone can mentor

• The flow must be going from people to people, so who is mentored also needs to be mentor of somebody else, everybody have something to teach, some peculiar knowledge or other talents

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MAINTAIN THE COMMUNICATION

The biggest danger for a distributed team (as the matter of facts also for a collocated team) is silence, lack of communication.

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DEFINE THINGS AND STICK TO DEFINITION

• People needs to have the things clear, in order to avoid confusion

• This means processes and procedure, definition, responsibilities

• This helps to have an orientation

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BE OPEN - Internally• Open company for open people

• Share with the team all the facts, be open and transparent, no hidden information no trick or mind games

• If a team is going to have autonomy, it needs to have all the relevant information

• Without all the relevant information the team members cannot make good decision

• Is the company in health? Are clients satisfied? What is the opinion about me? Is the business pipeline full?

• Share the results

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BE OPEN - Externally

• Open company for open people

• The external perception of the organisation and of the team is very important

• Do not try to cover problems or issues

• Talk about problems in public

• Share the outcomes and the possible solutions

• Openness create Trust

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CULTURE OF TRUST

• The teams and the team work are based on trust

• Especially for the distributed teams were there is a limited face to face communication and the convey of the emotions is more difficult

• If you don’t trust it means you will waste time checking the work of someone else

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CREATE BONDING OPPORTUNITIES

• In the distributed team there is a limited face to face communication and the convey of the emotions is more difficult

• More than 65 percent of social meaning occurs through the nonverbal channel

• Let the people participate in events

• Organise company retreats

• Organise social events

Page 43: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT

• It is important to be able to measure the results in order to be able to discuss and plan the improvements

• It is important to discuss the personal goals of the team members

• It is important to understand how everyone sees each others

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KEEP THE RHYTHM

• Like the drum on the boat, it is necessary to keep a rhythm for better results

• A good rhythm and fixed ceremonies support a good organisation of the work

• Some step and procedures helps also the more messy people to have a structure

Page 45: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

ASK DON’T TELL

• When you want the team to be autonomous you have to lead them, not to command them

• Give the full information so that the team can take the right decision

• If you ask people will take responsibility

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TRY TO LIMIT DISTRIBUTION

• Try to let the teams experience the lowest distribution level possible

• A good way is to organise team by location proximity (at least with good logistics)

• So the people can have a more frequent in-person meeting

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ATTENTION TO DISTRIBUTED STAKEHOLDERS

• Also the stakeholders may be distributed and they may be in different parts of the world

• The Product Owner needs to be enabled to contact them, involve them and keep them in the loop of communication

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PITFALLSHere come the

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PITFALLS

• Of course there can be issues (and there are)

• Some of them can be due to people, due to the organisation or, finally, due to clients

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I WON’T SEE THEM

• “I won’t see them” - “If they’re not in the office, they’re not working”

• This is quite common, especially in large enterprise environment were managers are used to see the lines of workers in front of their eyes

• It doesn’t matter if they are really working, at least they are there and I can see them, I have the feeling that they are producing

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I WON’T SEE THEM

• To avoid this it is necessary to Focus on Results

• It needs to be shared with the clients (sometimes it is really not easy and it needs a step by step approach)

• Provide tools to measure the results

• Build the trust

• Give feedback and ask for feedback

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MESSY COMMUNICATION

• Hold structured meetings

• Daily standup meetings

• Weekly updates

• Quarterly company retreat

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PEOPLE MAY LOSE CONTACT

• Remote work has a lot of benefits but it limits the face-to-face contact

• In-person activities are important

• Host regular company retreat

• Help the people to organise tech meet-ups were they can also meet in a non-work related environment

• Participate in/Organise events

Page 54: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

POSSIBLE UNBALANCED LIFE

• Working from home may lead to unbalanced day life

• For this is important to have a rhythm, also the SCRUM and other methods uses ceremonies to keep track of the time

• Landmarks are important to know were you are

• Help the people to have a regular daily schedule

Page 55: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

ISOLATION

• Working from home may lead people to get isolated, especially in long projects with the same set of interactions

• Smart working / Co-working could fix partially the problem, alone but together

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DELEGATION

• There are cases when in-person meetings are required

• Choose delegates from team (by proximity, availability, logistics, or others..)

• This can be good practice at the beginning of every initiative, not only for the problematic ones

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THE “BIG-PICTURE” IS NOT VISIBLE

• It is important that every team member is aware of the big picture, the are not producing one line of code, they are creating the software to manage an eShop

• During a visit to the NASA space center in 1962, President John F. Kennedy noticed a janitor carrying a broom. He interrupted his tour, walked over to the man and said, "Hi, I'm Jack Kennedy. What are you doing?""Well, Mr. President," the janitor responded, "I'm helping put a man on the moon."

• The Product Owner must have the tools to keep track of what is going on

Page 58: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

US VERSUS THEM

• It is easy to enter in this mood

• We should avoid the team to exclude the stakeholders or even the Product Owners

• It is important that the same rules of communication are standing inside and outside the team

Page 59: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

BIG AMOUNT OF WRITTEN COMMUNICATION

• It is important that people are organised and with good written skills

• It is important that people have the right tools to collect and share the information

• The tools have to give easy access to the information when needed

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Do you want to share your challenges or pitfalls?

QA

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ADVANTAGESAnd finally the

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TALENT

• When the location is not your limit you can choose the person you want

• It is possible to cherry pick the persons that you want to include in your team

• You can find the best-of-breeds for the topic that you require

• Since people are the main asset, this is a quite important advantage

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PRODUCTIVITY

• Usually people working with few disturb given from a normal office environment are more concentrated and more productive

• Also the environment (own home) can have positive effects on the person

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MINIMAL INFRASTRUCTURE

• There is no need for a complex infrastructure when people are working from home

• Also there are less problems with law compliances related to infrastructure security

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DIVERSITY

• The distribution is great for the inclusion of people from different location and with different backgrounds

• Diversity is important to face projects with different perspective

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ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS

• When people are working from home they will limit as much as possible the use of transportation

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WORK/LIFE BALANCE

• There is no travel time to work so the day is better optimised

• It is possible to participate more in the family life

• Bring kids to/from school, spend time with the new borns, spend time with relatives, have a lunch in family

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COST REDUCTION

• Managing a light weight infrastructure has a huge impact on costs

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BENEFITS FOR THE TEAM

• There is no need for a complex infrastructure when people are working from home, the costs are reduces so:

• In this way it is possible to reimburse the expenses for the connection, mobile, eventual transportation to the team

• In general there is a wider margin for employees benefits

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COMFORT

• The home environment allows you to work in the best way you wish

• No clothing rules (it is enough a shirt when conferencing :) )

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Do you want to share your advantages?QA

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And TechnologiesTools

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PROCESSES

• The main framework we use for our teams is SCRUM

• We have 5 SCRUM teams

• 3 to 7 people per team

• Little different from the plain SCRUM, the Product Owner is not in the Team

Page 74: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

PROCESSES

We have different kind of projects

• Technical, Process, Architectural, UX, Strategic Consultancy

• Technical, Process, Architectural, UX, Strategic Training / Training on the job

• Shared development (with clients’ team or other suppliers)

• End-to-End product development

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PROCESSES

• We have taken inspiration from many different frameworks

• We find suitable many concepts from the LeSS framework (Large Scale Scrum)

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taken from: http://less.works

Page 77: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

PROCESSES

• LeSS is for multiple teams working on the same product sharing the same sprints and objectives

• LeSS is based on SCRUM

• We do not apply strictly LeSS but we use some concept

• Decoupled application can fit well in this framework

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PROCESSES

“organisations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organisations"

— M. Conway, 1968 Symposium of modular programming

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PLANNING AND FORECASTING

• Plans are useless but planning is indispensable

• We needed the right tools for planning and forecasting to be dynamic enough for our structure

• Change of plans happens multiple times in a day

• We use JIRA Software and Tempo for planning and forecasting

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AUTOMATION

• The automation is a crucial factor for being agile

• Developers have to spend time in development not in setting up the infrastructure

• We use Bamboo or Jenkins for the task automation, Ansible for provisioning and a Docker-based system for running the servers (mainly Kubernetes)

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DEVELOPMENT AND VERSIONING

• We try to uniform the tools of development

• This can be a limit for someone which has his own favorite editor but it is a plus for the whole team, the knowledge on the tool can be shared

• We use IntelliJ (or PHPStorm, WebStorm for the specific technologies)

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DEVELOPMENT AND VERSIONING

• The versioning is on GIT on Bitbucket Server

• It is integrated with JIRA and it follows the feature branching model with an integration branch for each environment (dev, test, prod…)

• We use Pull Request to validate the code and eventually to start the automation

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KNOWLEDGE BASE

• All the knowledge related to an initiative is hosted on Confluence

• This is valid for product requirement pages, design documents, prototypes and so on

• Confluence allows interaction between team members and also interaction with the stakeholders

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PROTOTYPING

• We use different tools for prototyping

• Balsamiq, Axure and Adobe Experience Design

• These are good tools to keep interaction and communication between team members and stakeholders during the design of a product

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FILE REPOSITORY

• We use Sharepoint as file and document repository

• It is important to make available the documents to every team member

• Here they can also find company related documents, templates, fonts and so on

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COMMUNICATION

• Of course Mail, we use Gmail

• We use Slack for the instant messaging

• We have one channel per project and one channel per technology (competence center)

• We also have some fun channels (cinema, music, jokes, …)

• We use Telegram for informal communication and spontaneous chats out of the working hours

Page 87: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

COMMUNICATION

• For the daily scrums and for the conferences we use Google Hangout

• For webinars or for remote meetings we use either Hangout or GoToMeetings (the latter one to grant access to phone)

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for the attention!Thank you

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Questions?Do you have

Page 90: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

THANKS TO OUR SPONSORS

Social event Sponsor

Individual Sponsor Fabian Dennler

Website Hosting provided byContribution Sponsor

Page 91: Distributed Team Management: Pitfall, Challenges and Advantages

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