A Story of Communication

We had a pretty good offshore team! Our team members who have been on rotation to the remote site all came back very impressed. The offshore team was talented, knowledgeable, and smart. One had to wonder how come our client didn't think very highly of them!
During one sprint, our offshore team had signed up for a story that was prominent on the client's radar. They started by reviewing the story notes, huddling on the technical design, and coding away the solution.
Meanwhile, the client team was happily receiving updates during standup, and sending messages of support and encouragement.
Soon, the team started getting some feedback from the solution they implemented. The results weren't promising. It seems they were heading to a dead end. The team convened and decided on an alternate approach. Diligently, they started fixing the problems right away.
The fix took a longer than anticipated, but the team can now see the end in site. They doubled down their efforts to get the story done.
On another continent, the client was getting super nervous. The sprint was drawing to a close, and they still had a story in flight. It would look bad on their reports if we missed this story. They started inquiring whether we think we'll be done on time.
Our BA initiated many conversations with the offshore team. Trying to understand what's holding them back. The team explained where they are, and the message went back to the client: we'll get it done on time.
The team ended getting the story done in time, but with elevated levels of stress. They felt the client didn't allow them enough breathing room to get their tasks finished, and caused them to waste time and energy on useless meetings, instead of the needed focus on the task at hand.
The client, on the other hand, was displaying signs of loss of confidence, and even began to wonder whether the offshore team was incompetent.

What went wrong?
You may have concluded while reading this story that:

• The offshore team was not being transparent enough, by not sharing their status earlier with the client.
• The client wasn't proactive enough, by asking more probing questions.
• The offshore team was just trying to save face: why send a message of being late, while they could, soon enough, they believed, send the message: "we are done."
• The client wasn't supportive enough. They should have offered to help sooner.
• It's all because of cultural differences.

The answer is a little bit of all of the above. A direct consequence of working in a distributed setting is a lower quality of communication. None of us is perfect. We are bound to make mistakes, and something will always get lost in translation.

What's the way out?
It's easy enough to say "over-communicate," but that doesn't give enough guidance as to what we should do. Here are some concrete advice that may help:

• Build trust with the offshore team. Make sure you are seen as an ally. If the offshore team perceives they have lost your trust, they will be that much less likely to share potentially bad news.
• Seek opportunities for communication outside normal work sessions. It's amazing how much work related knowledge you can attain during a non-work setting. You get better context, better understanding of the team dynamics, and learn better ways to communicate fruitfully.
• Spend face time with the offshore team. Connections you build on a personal level will help immensely when you're physically present.
• At the same time, avoid at all cost attempting to micro-manage remotely. Not only you'll lose trust, you'll also slow the team down, introduce process friction, and become a bottleneck.

A better process flow in a distributed setting starts with building awareness of the situation. Start with the mindset that you are already losing information, and build mechanisms to counter.

Successful Distributed Development: Discipline, Awareness, and Initiative

For many of today's IT organizations, distributed development is not optional. Rather it is a fact of life. We should be mindful of the limitations introduced by this mode of operation, while working constantly to mitigate them. It is a challenge that we have to actively tackle. Focusing solely on the tools misses the opportunity for true collaboration. Tools should be considered an enabler; we won't be a able to work remotely without tools. But having the tools, by itself, doesn't guarantee success.

It's important for us to understand what the ideal is, so that we can strive to come as close as possible to achieve it, given whatever constraints our work environment imposes on us. There is no substitute for face to face interaction. There is nothing better than a co-located, cross-functional team. While we design our work activities, we should strive to converge as much as possible to these ideals.

I'm guessing all of this is not new to you. Yet time and again, distribute projects suffer from communication breakdowns, misunderstandings, unmet expectations, among many other dysfunctions, often resorting to heavy processes that only make things worse. There are successful distributed teams, however. Below are few of the traits exhibited by those teams. Adopting these traits in your distributed environment can help you converge more to the ideal.

Discipline

I often hear project leaders complain that their teams are not working very well together despite having state of the art telecommunication tools. It is valid to question the tools adequacy, ease of use, usability, etc. It is more important to observe when, how, and even if, the team is using them. Compare your current situation to that of a co-located team. Play a what if scenario: what if everyone had been working in the same room?
You will need a dedicated facilitator, a catalyst of sorts, in every one of your locations, to keep nudging people to reach out to each other. It is not fair to simply expect everyone to remember to get out of their immediate challenge to seek help, or to solicit a different perspective. Software development is an intellectually demanding profession, and it is not uncommon for people to get consumed by their immediate task, and forget to reach out. There are a set of dynamics that can only happen if the whole team is co-located. You could hear a couple of coworkers arguing about a problem you solved yesterday, or perhaps solving a problem you'll face tomorrow. You could have just come out from a planning session, with a new understanding of the product vision, and you may just share that with your colleagues. And there is where the team's facilitator role comes in: to play the above what if scenario. How about we tell the other offices about this? How about we consult with other locations to see if they encountered something similar? But it doesn't stop there.

A disciplined distributed team will embrace certain values and adhere to a set of practices that ensure that the whole team operates as a single, cohesive unit. It's easy for us to fall back to our comfort zones, or be consumed by tasks, than to always remember to reach out. The facilitators role is to make sure that the distributed team never misses an opportunity to act as a co-located one, whenever possible.

Awareness

Let's face it, we don't naturally know how to effectively work in a distributed environment. We may know we have teammates in other locations. We may be curious how they spend their days, wanting to learn the challenges they face, and looking forward to meeting them in person. This doesn't mean that this knowledge will be translated into changing how we perform our day to day work to adapt and address the limitations of this setting.

Well, our designated facilitator is there to change this reality. By actively seeking opportunities for cross-site collaboration, events, and feedback sessions, they continuously raise the whole team's awareness that a distributed setting requires a different mode of operation.

It's only when all the team members are fully aware, that location barriers start coming down. There are certain signs you can watch for to assess whether the team has reached such a level. For example, if you hear statements like "let's wait until you are here next week to discuss this", "I couldn't really explain myself to the other team over the video conference", or "I couldn't really tell if they were happy or mad with this change" are clear red flags. As a contrast, when the team has achieved full awareness, they won't let location be a barrier in effectively communicating ideas, or be a factor in whether or not they collaborate on a task. They become apt at explaining themselves and actively seeking feedback, thus consciously and proactively overcoming the limitations of the tools and the remote setting.

Initiative

While all of the above is good by itself, and while an active facilitator can help tremendously towards this end, we will need to have a team of self motivated individuals to really conquer location barriers. Individuals are the ones that carry out the necessary tasks to accomplish the team goals, and they are the ones who experience first hand the pains and the joys of getting things done. Unless we all are willing to step out of our comfort zones, seek new ways to make things better and overcome the daily challenges, and push each other to continuously improve, we won't have a chance in achieving our collective full potential.

I'll leave you with a quick tip: when choosing a mode of communication with a colleague, consider upgrading to a higher touch one. If you are about to send an email, how about instant message instead. While you are at it, won't a phone call be even better? But then, what's preventing you from having the discussion face to face? Oftentimes, we overestimate the risk of being disruptive, while underestimating the limitations of more passive forms of communication, like email. If you've experienced long winded email threads, going seemly forever, consider perhaps getting together in a room, virtual as it may be, to discuss things over. The dynamic will be vastly different, in a good way.

If we can’t all co-locate, we should try to come as close to it as we possibly can. We must be deliberate and disciplined in how we adapt our work to this new environment, maintain constant awareness of the situation, and demonstrate the initiative to challenge its limitations.