Slacker Manager

4 Success Factors for a Distributed Team

by Phil Gerbyshak on January 9th, 2008

Recently I shared 7 Strategies for Effective Distributed Teams, and asked the readers to share their best practices. Sarah Heal stepped up to the plate to share her best practices for working on a distributed team. She also has a nifty blog called Desire Lines.

Here’s what Sarah says:

We’re a small business that has only ever worked as a distributed team.

Key success factors for us have been:

1. Technology – we moved all of our information to SharePoint at the start of last year and do everything through the site. This includes all of our administration (time recording, expenses, invoicing etc), our business development, our projects, our intellectual property development and our knowledge management. We contract out our financial administration and so our service provider also works for us through our SharePoint site. Almost everyone in the team is a road warrior so we supplement this with a product called Colligo which allows us to take SharePoint offline, while retaining all of our views.
2. Getting together where possible – we don’t often work in the cities in which we live. This means that at any given time there is a possibility that two or more of us will be working in the same city (although on different assignments). On these occasions we always try to co-ordinate and have dinner.
3. Glue person – we have a person on the team who effectively acts as the team glue ensuring there is weekly phone contact with everyone.
4. Annual face-to-face planning meetings – I have to say that before we did this I thought it would be a colossal waste of time (and money). All that bonding – get out of here!! I’ve been surprised by the tangible and intangible benefits (which I won’t go into here) and this is now a regular fixture for us.

Awesome tips Sarah! Thanks so much for sharing your insights!

If you have insights you’d like to share with the Slacker Manager readers, please use the link on the right that says “Phil Gerbyshak” and send me a note anytime, or leave a comment on a post. I can’t promise I’ll use everything you say, but I promise to read it and may share it offline or online so we can all learn together!

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POSTED IN: change, innovation, teamwork