How To Manage Remote Development Teams

Working with remote teams is more difficult than working when a team is sat in the same room. Managing remote teams when they are spread geographically is extremely difficult to do well. This is mostly about communications and using team structure and team culture to make offshore development and remote team collaboration work.

Continuous Delivery, DevOps and agile development techniques provide a better basis to make this work than more traditional approaches, but it is still more difficult.

In this episode, Dave Farley offers some advice on how to make remote teams effective. He describes some approaches to team organisation, team culture, people’s roles in teams as well as the technical consideration necessary to make it all work. How do you make “remote pair programming” work, Dave can tell you.

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[crankytec]

That's it, I am calling it. This is the David Attenborough of Continuous Delivery.

[cryptout]

Working in an international team for almost 3 years and I can concur that getting to
know each other is key. We used to go to each country for a few days and switch every few weeks the first year. Now with Cov we have not visited other countries in more than a year but our connections are established and we can still work very efficiently via teams/zoom.

[Proactivity]

Cultural differences can make things challenging in surprising ways. I once came into an existing London investment bank team as a contractor hired by a consultancy company leading the project, to lead the London and Mumbai teams, and I was introduced to them as such. We'd have joint UK-time morning meetings for progress reports and to set the direction for the day's work, which worked well in London, but the Indian team would go off and do their own thing. Progress reports would be "actually, we talked among ourselves and decided to do something completely different". It turned out that because of my position, not being a direct employee, they didn't recognise my authority at all. To them, their boss was their boss in their office, and so completely disregarded anything I said, involving restructuring channels of communication and coordination. Fun times.

[jamstawildman]

Another great video, full of words of wisdom.

[Andrew-ncyj]

One thing that I think this video is missing is the notion of fully remote teams, it focuses a lot of distributed teams rather than distributed people where colocation for all team members is not possible. This presents a whole new series of challenges with synchronous communications and has different techniques to employ which would be a good future video

[MrRobotoDomo]

I have several experience working with remote teams. And honestly, everything here he said here is 200% true story. REMOTE CONTROL is actually one of the most effective way to have a productive team. Remove vagueness in the scope and make the task very specific and clear. This removes the dependencies from a remote resource.

[m.x.]

Sitting together in the same office might or might not be better. The key factor is people's attitude, way more than anything else. Many people work physically together and still don't know how to communicate with each other properly. It's true that it's necessary to have personal contact with your team from time to time, especially if you're a junior and you're still learning and maturing as a professional, but that's not necessarily the case for seniors.

[dorcohen]

Regrading splitting a team to product management in Europe and Software in India.
Well, we all know why that happened... and no methodology was involved in this decision.

[FeLiNe]

I work remotely and I am very happy with my job. I also get paid 8 times the avergae salary in my country.

EDIT: I hate to be told when to start working and when to leave the office, what office rules I should follow, what clothes I should wear, etc...

[kayakMike]

Man... this channel is great!!! You're the professional I hope to be!

[johndoe]

I have led international teams for many years. And my mantra is; the best tool for remote working is a goldcard and free travel. Meeting people discuss stuff over a beer is way more functional than anything else. Remote working can work very very well, but it requires quite a bit of effort. And dont expect to save money on it. Another important tool is something like slack. Chatting is important. Abd dont forget psychology. I like the advice about coaching a local channeling guy. I realise thata i have done that but more like a sude effect rather than a cpncious decision. Willl take that with me....

[briancolfer]

Many of these ideas apply to remote workers as well as to remote teams. It would be also useful to have some insights on the communication techniques to improve interactions as and with remote workers.

[krumbo]

Each video is a master piece. Such a good content and still free.

[zicada]

One of the best thumbnails on the internet

[harag]

Great presentation. thanks. I work in a smallish team (4-5) and we are all now remote working given the current situation and use MS Teams for our meetings, etc. The one thing we're finding difficult is that "have you got a second for a question" type of chats or "Would doing it like x be better", etc. I watched your Pair Programming video and wondered about how to go about that more given the remote working. One good thing is, that it stops me stealing their mouse and showing them how to do it.

[Alphadeias]

Dave is the programming grandpa you didnt know you need

[randyrrandelson]

I wished I worked on your development team! Awesome stuff

[andrewharpin]

Distributed decision control and not micro managing off shore teams is critical.

Having and showing that faith in the team earns you their respect, resulting in greater commitment and a willingness to go "above and beyond".

This inclusion drops the service barriers that many of these individuals are accustomed to and shifts their perspective to contribution rather than just "following orders".

[Anne-cvms]

That was amazing content, thank you very much !!

[mineralisk]

Thanks for the quality content (just like in many other videos on this channel)