Ask HN: How to manage remote teams better? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to manage remote teams better?

13 pointsrvivek6 comments

Our team is split between CA & India. We've a daily scrum to discuss what was done the day before and things to do on that day. All of us are on our private IRC channel to ensure everyone's on the same page.

Still, quite a few things even though non-major (which are important to make the product polished) get lost due to distance and time zone differences.

Can you share some of the things you learnt while managing remote teams?

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I would say the single most important rule that we ever put in place for our team which is completly distributed is that everything goes in the ticket system. No matter how small if it requires work, it goes into the ticket system. This ensures that there is a ticket out there that is being tracked, the project cannot be considered complete until all tickets are either dealt with or backlogged. Having a process built around a ticket system is instrumental to a process where things don't fall off the radar. A good deal of the ticket systems like JIRA integrate with the major IDE's, and most source control repositories can be configured to require a commit note. Many of the plugins integrate with source control to update the ticket at the same time you commit. Further some will even branch and merge just by clicking on a ticket and setting it's state to open. The point being with a little modeling of your process you can implement defect and feature tracking in a way that works with the natural flow of development. Doing so will patch a lot of the areas where information is leaking and not being captured.

My team has people on East Coast, West Coast, Asia and Europe.

The simple stuff:

* As kls said, everything goes into a ticket * virtual water cooler (yammer) to allow collab with other teams * web-based code review tools * when ever possible IM or phone is preferred method of communication

The hard stuff:

Overcome cultural differences regarding office politics, work ethic etc for workers outside of the USA. If you can get a good team leader on the other side of the pond who really "get's it", pay that person well. S/he will have more leverage with people and be able to get the message across better.

We've also gone against the norm and really kept high expectations for our "off shore" folks and given then big responsibilities. We want them to become great designers and coders and be able to work independent.

If things are getting lost then:

1. During scrum take notes for everyone while they are speaking.

2. End of the call send out an email to all with Minutes of meeting(which could just be what you noted above or shorter version).

3. Next day/scrum start from the last meeting's note and see if pending issues were worked on or missed(if missed highlight them right away).

4. Use a tool like JIRA/Confluence/Trello or XPlanner to organise teams/tasks/stories and assign tickets for every outstanding issue/task(Do not hesitate even if it is a 2 minute task).

5. Circulate weekly progress to everyone so that everyone knows where the team stands.Tool like xplanner are very good in providing charts/graphs from the data you enter everyday.

Good luck !

Sending minutes and discussing it next day is a great idea. Thanks for the tip.

-Establish schedules and stick to them. -Be super positive and encouraging. -Let them know you value them -Give strong financial incentives. -Don't make assumptions about what they know or don't know. -Understand the time and culture. -It's ultimately a lot more time and work than you think

Does your team work the same hours? ..I have read some successful remote teams have everyone working the same 9-5

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