Making Virtual and Remote Teams Shine

Learn practical ways of getting the most of your remote and virtual teams. Come hear from a diverse set of speakers about how they've been able to leverage the strength of remote teams and how they have addressed the difficulties of working in this fashion. Learn about tools, techniques, and cultures that allow and encourage virtual and mixed remote/in-house teams to shine. With a focus on practical and tested advice, you are sure to go back Monday morning with several actionable ideas.

Day of week:

Tuesday

Location:

Seacliff A/B

Host:

Amr Elssamadisy

Presentations

High Performance Virtual Teams - Oxymoron or Necessity?

1:35pm - 2:25pm

By: Ashley Johnson
Senior Coach at Industrial Logic

Virtual and distributed teams operate by the same laws of human behavior as collocated full time teams. However, virtual teams choose to operate in suboptimal environments which may reduce feedback, delay learning, hinder progress, and obscure dysfunction until it’s too late. This makes it far more important for virtual and distributed teams to understand and operate by the simple laws which underlie all high performance teams. In this session, we will identify key principles for high performance product development teams, and explore which of these we can and cannot control in virtual teams.

Participants are encouraged to prepare by reflecting on the most productive and least productive groups you’ve worked with, including both collocated, distributed, full time, and part time teams. Please come prepared to collaborate, bring a pen, and bring high expectations of yourself, the presenter, and other participants.

Virtual Teams Open Space

4:05pm - 4:55pm

By:

Lean Apart: A Case Study in Agile UX Design for a Distributed Team

11:45am - 12:35pm

By: Jennifer Hayes , Adam Archer
User Experience Designer at IBM-- Technical team lead at IBM

Collaboration between multi-disciplinary, globally distributed teams can be a challenge. Our talk will cover how we brought our team together in both local and remote settings to learn the practice of design studios, making them an integral part of doing UI design. We want to convey the awesome value of sketching with cross-discipline team members, and that includes developers! It shortens the feedback loop drastically, allowing designs to get in front of users faster. This "agile design" works hand in hand with the faster pace of agile development cycles. We’d like to walk you through the design studio method itself, the benefits it can bring to any software development project, and offer guidance on how to run sessions effectively with remote teams. We’ll share what we’ve learned along the way, and show you the benefits it brought to our project.

Presentations

No Formula for This

5:20pm - 6:10pm

By: Tom Santero
Technical Evangelist for Basho

It's 2013, the internet is available everywhere and you work for an engineering driven company. Do you really need office space? Buy a few books on agile and lean, pick the appropriate git workflow and you're done, right? Not exactly.

Despite a handful of exemplary distributed teams the efficacy of working remote is wrought with challenges. The relationships and interactions among team members critically define the success of any company, regardless of geographic proximity. So what differentiates success from failure across various distributed companies? How can we optimize for the former, avoiding the latter?

All too often the subject of working distributed zeros in on tooling and methodologies, almost always concerning communication channels. This is not unexpected; after all, human beings tend to focus on difference over commonality. Questions like "how do you ensure everyone is on the same page?" are important, but paradoxically those answers are largely irrelevant. The interesting questions are not what tools we use to communicate, but rather what drives communication. There is no formula for this. In this talk we will explore the various configurations of distributed teams, dissecting both productive as well as undesirable qualities that emerge when working remotely. We will postulate that distributed teams are novel and worth consideration, but ultimately impossible to reduce and replicate.

Culture and Happiness in Virtual teams

10:30am - 11:20am

By: Floyd Marinescu
CEO and co-founder, C4Media Inc

Purpose, Autonomy, and Mastery are the true recipes for a highly motivated team according to Dan Pink, author of ‘Drive’ – and virtual teams more than any other kind of team need these to work well.

In this talk, I as the CEO will deliver a non-engineering focused talk about the how and why the company that brought you InfoQ.com and QCon is organized to deliver these three feelings to the teams that have been running completely virtually for over 7 years:

How to foster and continually reinforce a feeling of connectedness, shared values and purpose in a virtual environment
Meeting rhythms needed to keep people aligned
Coach vs. manager mindset for leaders
Process ownership vs. task execution delegation mindset for new hires
Metrics, kpis, and transparency
Quarterly objective planning and focus
Transparency and trust
Key tools: kanban, dashboards, business plan canvases, metrics, yammer (micro-blogging), skype, email, etc

InfoQ and QCon is run by C4Media, a company with 30 full time and networks of 150 part time contributors across over a dozen countries. Collectively we serve over 800,000 unique visitors/month online and 6000 conference attendees/yr.

Synergistic Effects: A mixed remote/inhouse team can be better than the sum of its parts

2:50pm - 3:40pm

By: Dana Caulder
Sr Software Engineer at Genentech

Genentech Research & Early Development does a significant amount of in-house software development to support its drug discovery effort. In the last several years our software development staff has more than doubled, employing both local and remote contractors. Although expanding this quickly and working with remote team members has been challenging, we've had great success. We attribute this success to our emphasis on creating mixed in-house/remote teams where:

there are no second-class citizens
everyone is encouraged and willing to make contributions and compromises
we all strive for effective, but not overly burdensome communication

In this session we will explore some of our specific practices that contribute to our team’s effectiveness, including:

adaptations of agile methodologies to improve communication and delivery
alignment of development processes and tooling that support iterative improvement
processes to mitigate team member turnover and speed-up onboarding

After attending this session you will be able to take a critical look at your team's characteristics and develop a process that actually works for all of you. We will share with you a variety of concrete examples of process changes that have worked (or not) for us and send you away ready to take your own first steps towards developing a more effective mixed in-house/remote team.