As I sit down to write with my freshly brewed cup of Red Apple coffee with the music I want to hear playing in the background, I realise that working in isolation with a dispersed team isn't all that bad.
Ludi is based in Vancouver, and we have developers in New York, a little hamlet in the north of England, and now in Seattle.
There are certainly challenges to working in a distributed team, many of which I touched on when I began my MA in Virtual Communication out of RMIT in Melbourne. This course came to be as a result of many, many corporates in the world grappling with issues of trust, motivation and competence in their global teams.
For an individual working in a small team of less that ten, presumably the issues are easier to manage... personally, I feel a need to rely more heavily on personal reporting and accountability, and we have a number of tools in place (Phone, wiki, blog, email, IMs) to stay in touch with each other.
Apart from all the technological tools which certainly aid my endeavours, I find it very simple to detach myself from those when I think about the effectiveness of my work. I can see it terms of offline endeavour. Am I motivated? Do I like my team mates? Do I enjoy the work? Yes, yes and yes.
To me this is more important than cables and the internet. If you want to work, it doesn't matter where you are.
Ludi is based in Vancouver, and we have developers in New York, a little hamlet in the north of England, and now in Seattle.
There are certainly challenges to working in a distributed team, many of which I touched on when I began my MA in Virtual Communication out of RMIT in Melbourne. This course came to be as a result of many, many corporates in the world grappling with issues of trust, motivation and competence in their global teams.
For an individual working in a small team of less that ten, presumably the issues are easier to manage... personally, I feel a need to rely more heavily on personal reporting and accountability, and we have a number of tools in place (Phone, wiki, blog, email, IMs) to stay in touch with each other.
Apart from all the technological tools which certainly aid my endeavours, I find it very simple to detach myself from those when I think about the effectiveness of my work. I can see it terms of offline endeavour. Am I motivated? Do I like my team mates? Do I enjoy the work? Yes, yes and yes.
To me this is more important than cables and the internet. If you want to work, it doesn't matter where you are.