A little history.  I am Australian, live in London, most of our customers are in the US and we have developers in both India and Australia. Over the last year with Bright Green and the last five years living away from Australia, I think I have learned a thing or two about working with a distributed team!

1. Establish a set of common work hours.

It is often not the actual distance, but it is the time-zones that makes working with distributed teams difficult.  In order to still feel like you are part of the same team, there needs to be at least a few hours each day when you are all sitting at your desks at the same time.

2. Daily Contact with Video Calls

Proponents of Scrum and Agile know the importance of a quick, daily stand-up meeting.

Daily meetings are even more important when you don’t have the benefit of sitting in the same office.  Teleconferences are great, however, to really feel like a team, there really is something special about actually seeing each others faces and picking up on the body language.

Skype has free video calls, as do other applications such as Google Chat.

3. Actually meet up in person

For the team to really gel – it is important if at some point, your entire team physically meets each other and has a few good bonding experiences.  This generally works best with some structured “team building activities” during the day – but then it  is then great to let your hair down at night with a few drinks.

It really helps when the team feel they know each other on a personal level.

4. Use tools to collaborate, share information and status!

Sharing information is always a little bit harder when your team is spread out. Hosted, collaborative tools can really help bring a team together and allow you to work off the same page.  A tool such as Bright Green Projects allows your team to easily collaborate on different requirements or issues.  It also makes it clear who is doing what, by looking at our virtual kanban wall.

For those working in much less structrued manner, google documents or wikis can allow simple and easy collaboration.

5. Take time to understand the culture

Everyone is different. Everyone is even more different when you are dealing with different cultures.  Take the time to learn a little about the country and the specific culture of the people in your remote team.  It does not take long, but it makes a huge difference to your relationship.

These books are often a little opinionated, but can be quite helpful to give you a crash course in a new culture;

http://www.ovalbooks.com/xeno/index.html

6. Instant Messenger

Everyone in the team needs to have instant messenger. It serves a few purposes. The first one is that you can easily and quickly have a chat to someone, even if they are not in the same room. Secondly, it is just makes you feel a little more connected when you can see each other’s statuses and gives some accountability for your time.

7. Screen Sharing

Especially on IT Projects, it is essential that you can share your screen so you can show people in a different location what you are talking about.  Recently, Skype have added the ability to share your screen using video calls, or other applications such as Citrix GoToMeeting are equally helpful.

Please feel free to use the comments to suggest other ways to work with a distributed team and I will update the blog!