Had a Big Mac lately?

I’ve got a good excuse for you – as an experiment to increase the productivity of your team.

Did you know that if you go to a McDonalds drive-thru at a certain store in Missouri, the person on the other end of the speaker is actually 900 miles away in Colorado? The operator in Colorado takes your order and keys it into their system, it is then relayed to the kitchen 900 miles away where your burger and fries are thrown together? Oh yeah, they also take a digital photo of you so they can be sure they give the order to the right customer!!

The next step for them is to outsource this to India and begin taking orders from multiple restaurants.

I got this story from a great book I am reading called ”The World is Flat” by Thomas Friedman and was shocked and amazed at some of the things that globally distributed teams are achieving.

Another great story was about how doctors in certain emergency departments can actually send xrays and scans to the other side of the world, with the help of the internet for diagnosis.  This is not to save money, it is to make sure the best doctor in the world is looking at your problem.  This technology is also really helping smaller hospitals who don’t have the specialist staff all hours of the day and night.

Forming a new team on a project is hard.  You need to make sure that all members have the appropriate technical and business skills, that everyone gels and can work well together and that as a team and that you cover off the nine key areas of high performing teams.  Pretty stiff criteria.

We are finding that our Agile Project Management Software is particuarly helpful for distributed software development teams.  As Bright Green Projects is completly hosted in the cloud, the team can all work together on requirements and issues, plan sprints and keep up to date with the status of their project, no matter what the location.

Working together in the same room is perfect – but distributed teams can achieve amazing things given the right tools.