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When working with remote development teams in Bangalore with business hours that barely overlap with ours, we need to employ new techniques to enhance our communication to create greater efficiencies.
A Senior Art Director on our team regularly captures screenshots of issues that need to be updated and includes notes in a PDF for absolute clarity (see example above). These visual instructions are key to great communication.
Back in March, a group of us at SxSW had a conversation about some other ideas on how to maximize our remote collaborations:
> Try having designers brainstorm and sketch during the day and have developers craft a prototype overnight as an example of very agile development.
Click "read more" for more ideas >>
> Consider sending a US-based technology liaison to Bangalore for three months for constant communications and successful onboarding.
> Assigning shadow resources (a jr. person to a trusted resource) in Bangalore often helps new hires get up to speed faster.
> Schedule time for the US and Bangalore teams to communicate regularly and openly about the best and worst things that happened with recent projects to refine the relationships and build a better future together.
What works for your team? Share your ideas here.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
It's my belief that having a development blog might be a solution.
All comments would be seen and comments would be available. I think this would be superior to email in that chains of emails can get lost. (particularly with Outlook which does not have threaded emails STILL!) Additionally, your plan of commenting on a PDF's wonderful the only issue with that as I see it, is receiving the correct revisions.
What the games team has used and found some success with is a centralized area where everyones tasks and duties are listed. We meet weekly to go over said tasks and discuss issues.
Additionally, we have found that sharing google docs or zoho docs has been useful.
Overall, it's clear the tools are out there to make remote teams work regardless of time. It's just a matter of setting a working system and sticking to it.”
Posted at 1:55PM on May 24th 2008 by lcourtines
It's my belief that having a development blog might be a solution.
All comments would be seen and comments would be available. I think this would be superior to email in that chains of emails can get lost. (particularly with Outlook which does not have threaded emails STILL!) Additionally, your plan of commenting on a PDF's wonderful the only issue with that as I see it, is receiving the correct revisions.
What the games team has used and found some success with is a centralized area where everyones tasks and duties are listed. We meet weekly to go over said tasks and discuss issues.
Additionally, we have found that sharing google docs or zoho docs has been useful.
Overall, it's clear the tools are out there to make remote teams work regardless of time. It's just a matter of setting a working system and sticking to it.”
Posted at 1:56PM on May 24th 2008 by lcourtines
It's my belief that having a development blog might be a solution.
All comments would be seen and comments would be available. I think this would be superior to email in that chains of emails can get lost. (particularly with Outlook which does not have threaded emails STILL!) Additionally, your plan of commenting on a PDF's wonderful the only issue with that as I see it, is receiving the correct revisions.
What the games team has used and found some success with is a centralized area where everyones tasks and duties are listed. We meet weekly to go over said tasks and discuss issues.
Additionally, we have found that sharing google docs or zoho docs has been useful.
Overall, it's clear the tools are out there to make remote teams work regardless of time. It's just a matter of setting a working system and sticking to it.”
Posted at 1:56PM on May 24th 2008 by lcourtines
Posted at 8:23AM on May 28th 2008 by jadie