DrupalCon Portland 2013

Equipos de desarrollo distribuidos geográficamente

Karen Stevenson  · 

Transcripción

Extracto de la transcripción automática del vídeo realizada por YouTube.

I think we're going to go ahead and get rural in here I'm sure people are still still coming in from lunch but we'll go ahead and get started so the session is remotely virtual which is about remote teams or virtual teams so if that's not what

you thought you were coming to you can leave if you want to I'm Karen Stevenson and let's let's go ahead and talk about this i am i'm a been involved with drupal since well for about seven years and I in the co maintainer of cck and maintainer

of date and calendar and a bunch of other things like that so that so that's how I got connected to Drupal I work for lullaby consulting we're a big Drupal shop we do a lot of training we do a lot of consulting and we do a lot of web development work

front-end back-end design and everything else and lots of big lots of big sites that we've worked on Martha Stewart and Grammys calm and WWE and lots of others as well so this man right here is my great-grandfather he's the first cat herder in our

family burden cats don't let anybody tell you it's easy anybody can hurt cattle hold them together 10,000 half mile short hairs how about some other thing all together being a cat herders probably about the toughest thing I think I've ever done

I got this one this morning right here and if you look at his face it is ripped to shreds you know to see the movies yet to hear the stories that's I'm living a dream not everyone can do what we do I wouldn't do nothing else it ain't an easy

job but when you bring a hurt into town and ain't lost the one of them ain't no feeling like it in the world all right I love that commercial herding cats so does managing a remote team feel a little bit like herding cats yes it does so let's let's

start people throw around the terms of virtual and remote kind of interchangeably but they're really not the same thing so let's talk about terminology for just a second so virtual means something that doesn't really exist right something that's

sort of simulating are pretending to be something else and remote means things that are far away something that's not close so for instance Drupal is the Drupal community is a virtual team they're a Drupal is not a company that you can join you can't

you can't get hired at Drupal you can't get fired by drupal you decide to be a part of it and and Drupal can't do anything about it more or less so that's a virtual team and we obviously have remote members on this team they're very international

it's all over the all over the world I used to when when people ask what I did I used to say I am a remote employee on a virtual company but that's not actually true because blow bud is not really a virtual company it's it's a real company

but we do have remote employees in fact that's all we have is remote employees so it's kind of unusual in the sense that we don't really have anybody who's not remote unlike a lot of teams where remote is kind of the exception at lolla but

remote is is what everybody is and then low about intern participates in virtual project teams with lots of other people so we we work with a client and we end up with a project team that is partly comprised of Drupal of our lull about people and partly comprised

of people from the client that we're working with and in some cases another vendor is involved in some cases there are multiple departments from the other from the client or whatever so we end up on a lot of these virtual teams so again that's that

that's a team of people that's come together for a purpose but there you know that that's where the virtual comes in and and it has remote members so we've got a lot of kind of variations of all of this so who exactly is remote well the obvious

answer is you've got an in-house team and you've got remote contractors so a company might have remote contractors that they bring in to do certain things like work on a website you can have a company that has a remote employees so maybe there are

individual employees in the company that work from home or work from some place that's not the same place that everybody else works with you can have remote offices and remote offices are interesting because people a lot of times you don't think about

remote offices when they talk about remote employees but a remote office is sort of this in the same boat as a remote employee a lot of times they're kind of the forgotten stepchild that kind of is out of the loop and doesn't know what's going

on at the mothership and i would i would say that it even goes a little farther than that because if you've got people who are working while they're traveling you've got people who are temporarily remote and they need they need to be able to function

and do their job but they're not connected they don't have the connection you can have people that are working from home during emergencies and that could be either the emergency of the employee you know my kid is sick and I don't have a babysitter

I'm going to have to work from home today or it could be we've had a blizzard and and I can't get I can't get to work or it could be something's happened at work and I in work isn't there and I've got to work from home and you can

have open source and joint venture projects which kind of where drupal falls in right that you've got this virtual community of people that's working together on a mutual project and I would venture I would actually say that you can even take it a

step further there is research now that says that even you know you've got you've got companies where people are working in different buildings and those people may be somewhat remote from each other there's actually research that says teams that

have members in the same building but just on different floors actually have some of the same kinds of problems that distributed teams across the country have because you know if you're not there if you're not right in front of everybody that's

a little different so many teams have remote elements probably more teams than anybody really realizes because if if somebody says you know we don't we don't have remote in our company most likely you have one of these things the only people that really

only companies that really don't have any remote employees at all would be a very small company where everybody is physically in the same location and you never work with anybody else and that's probably not that many so if you go back to kind of the

traditional idea of you know remote means people are working from home they work from wherever they are of the benefits are obvious right you've got access to the best talent wherever that that talent maybe gives you a wider pool of employees your employees

have more of a global perspective it's not just this narrow little group of people that work right where you do they may be more productive and more available because they're not commuting they're not wasting their time doing this that kind of

thing and they may be less expensive because you don't have to pay for a desk in an office building they're they're working from home so there's a lot of benefits what's coming into play more and more as employers are beginning to realize

that having the ability for people to work remotely is is actually kind of business interruption insurance a client that I work with you know the hurricane sandy how many businesses were unable to work in New York City after Hurricane sandy and those that

were already set up with the capability of allowing people to work remotely were able to continue to do business as normal even though their offices were actually shut down so it turned out to be kind of business interruption insurance so there's some

employers that don't embrace this idea of remote employees there's been a lot of discussion about what does this that yahoo said we don't want people working from home and I don't think personally I don't I don't see that as any kind

of like a smear on the idea of working remotely I think yahoo is just a special case they've got their own reasons for doing what they do and wanting to do what they want to do and I don't think in any way shape or form it means that remote work is

going away or it's not important or there's a new trend coming or anything like that it's it's just their particular situation there's a lot of things that employees love about it you got a flexible schedule you've got the ability to

do some work life balance you don't have commuting you got fewer interruptions those things are great but it comes with responsibility so you can't just be a remote employee and just say you know I'm going to do whatever I want to do you be you

have some responsibilities that come with it so I I've come up with like my five Commandments for team members there's probably more than 5 but 5 seems like a nice number so you will spend much time on the phone one of the things we tell people when

they come to work for a lull about for the first time if they haven't been especially if they haven't worked remotely before is be sure you get yourself a new phone plan because you are going to be on the phone a lot and I think almost everybody doesn't

believe that enough and ends up with like a $500,000 phone bill the first month that they're working and then they're going oh my god you really meant it yeah yeah we really mean it you're going to be on the phone a lot you have to be visible and

accessible you cannot just drop into a black hole and disappear that's that won't work and in fact when we have people like that and sometimes this happens you get somebody a remote team who just doesn't get how do you work remotely and they do

just sort of disappear during the day and you know maybe throw some code over the wall every once in a while it doesn't work you can't you can't function that way part of the agreement for somebody to be in a remote employee is they have to understand

that you have responsibilities so you can't and you can't disappear with explanation you can disappear everybody can't always be visible everywhere but you've got to let people know what's going on you must over communicate and that is

everybody that is management has to over communicate and employees have to over communicate and you you can't over-communicate and there is no way to do this successfully without understanding how to use the virtual tools so if you don't know or you

don't want to learn how to use virtual tools you know people in this room probably don't have any problem with that at all but what we you do have teams where there are people who are not comfortable with virtual tools and that can be a real problem

I want it i want to reiterate commandment number one you will spend a lot of time on the phone now there are some potential problems that come with remote workers isolation you know people are not in a group of people they may not feel like they belong they

may feel like they're kind of cut off from everyone else it may be hard for people who are working remotely to feel a sense of rapport with the rest of the team it's nice to work remotely to to have that work family balance but the work/family balance

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