Just four years ago, I would have been skeptical about managing a global virtual team, and so would our clients. In 2006 one of our clients put it this way, "we won't work with a firm that doesn't have a central office where everyone meets." The watchword was "bricks and mortar."
That's all changed. In fact, being a virtual company is almost assumed by default. Today our clients expect to meet virtually via screen share services such as Go To Meeting or WebEx. Offices, lobbies, and other accoutrements are not as significant as they once were to our clients — even if those very same clients have Park Avenue Headquarters themselves.
This has been facilitated by ever-improving internet architecture with increasingly reliable bandwidth, as well as evolving virtual collaboration tools.
One unintended outcome of these changes has been that we are operating around the clock.
Rock around the clock
From our point of view, being able to staff up with people who are not in the metro area and literally not commuting to work gives us flexibility. The explosive growth of Drupal has meant we are going beyond the local area to attract the brightest and the best of Drupal talent, even if it means we are managing a large virtual team. Today we have people in five different timezones around the planet.
Drupal Web Development - Rock Around the Clock
We can start early — at 7AM Mountain time, to be precise! Naturally, our Easterners are already on a second cup of coffee. Our European contingent is done with lunch, while our Japan staff is checking in close to midnight — but that's okay. Europe and Japan have been working the client projects, bring progress on their solutions that are taken up by the entire team in the morning scrum. Work continues throughout the day, until it is late in the day in North America, but then the Japan team picks up the ball again.
The team works around the clock, so to speak, passing the baton from subject-matter specialist in one time zone to subject-matter specialist in another time zone. Nevertheless, the entire team scrums four times a week together – in real-time. Minimally it is by-voice with the option to screen share or go to video.
Even more important, by ranging beyond the drive-time pool of talent, we are able to attract a larger base of top-notch people. Our team's wisdom is essential to every project we do. Management luminary Peter Drucker calls these individuals "knowledge workers." They are there to work as a team to come up with the best solutions by working in a collegial atmosphere. These individuals work and bill only when they are working on client projects, and they are free to pursue other activities when not on the project. Neither we nor our clients end up paying for someone to sit around surfing the web.
Like a NASA Mission, the client's Project moves around the globe. Like NASA, our team is connected in real time, bringing diverse expertise to bear on the project.
Top-notch, ground-breaking organizations such as NASA understand and respect the individuals who have demonstrated their ability to come through, and we aspire to follow that model.
Evolving tools to collaborate around the globe
For several years we used Skype, which is essentially free and whose chat rooms are perfect for asynchronous conversations on specific topics, but as the team size grew, Skype's band-width could not keep apace with the demands for real-time voice communication amongst the entire team. Though it cost us a bit more, we moved to WebEx. This brought the added benefit of robust screen sharing, which we use during @RISK-enhanced project estimation, as well as having video capability, which adds to the immediacy of the scrum experience.
The virtual team can screen share complex data in real time without having to be in the same conference room. A complex @RISK analysis can be "scrubbed" in realtime, assumptions tested, and reality checked.
We still use Skype for a back-channel and have side bars to work out details. This means we keep our scrum very short, yet focused on actual issues. If a scrum lasts more than 10-15 minutes, it has run long.
Having tried homegrown tools and some out-of-the-box time tracking software, we settled on Liquid Planner ("LP") about two years ago. LP has far more pluses than minuses. Through LP we track our burn rate by ticket, by person. Additionally, but going to a numeric naming system, entire sections of the project can be monitored and shared with the team.
Projects are broken down at the ticket level based on probabilistic estimates, and then rolled up. The Team not only shares this information internally amongst themselves, this data is also shared, virtually, with clients, and in real time.
Moreover, we can share the charts with clients, right down to the ticket level. Our clients and team are able to collaborate on our full backlog during development implementation.
In addition to LP, we also employ the Drupal-powered Open Atrium ("OA"), software which is the canonical repository of all communications and requests for information. Each client has a dedicated webapp space devoted to that client's project(s). No forgetting to include someone on the distribution, or having an important message languishing in the inbox because someone is away from the office.
What a difference a few years make! Is it possible to productively and effective work in a team that's based in different time zones? We found the answer to be, "Yes!" And we're not alone. Large Drupal shops such as Acquia do it [disclosure: we are Acquia partners], as do boutique players.
Looking Backward
Jules Verne wrote science fiction. In 1873, his Around the World in 80 Days appeared in print. Less than a hundred years later, people were circling the Earth in about 80 minutes, and humans had walked on the moon, also a Jules Verne plot.
Standardized time zones in the United States really only came into being with the advent of the transcontinental railroad of the Guilded Age, about the same time as Verne wrote. It is said that before the standardization of time zones, there were as many as 300 micro-time-zones within the United States.
But with the vast telecommunication network and satellites, even the 80 minutes it takes an orbiter to travel around the globe, has been supplanted by instantaneous travel, albeit virtual.
Debora Spar in her book, Ruling the Waves, addresses the progress of communication and its impact on commerce. She points out that without rapid communication, commerce is hobbled. The relatively modern stock-exchange only came into existence when the telegraph system came into being.
The compression of time and the world has led to some interesting challenges and unforseen benefits, so no we can work anywhere and anytime, and while this was always a shibboleth, we are seeing it in everyday reality.
Team on! Drupal Rocks Around the Clock.
When the clock strikes twelve, we'll cool off then,
Start a rockin' round the clock again.
We're gonna rock around the clock tonight,
We're gonna rock, rock, rock, 'til broad daylight.
We're gonna rock, gonna rock, around the clock tonight.
