Managing remote Offices

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Directi recently started offices in Bangalore and New Delhi. Both of these are meant to be development centers. Several of our related projects are being developed across these offices now. This document chronicles some advice from lessons we are learning in managing development projects across multiple remote offices.

The water-cooler effect

A lot of the information osmosis in a single office environment takes place ad-hoc without any formal engagement / meetings (I call this the water-cooler effect). People chat with one another at the water-cooler, or during coffee breaks, or in the cafetaria or in the corridors etc. People socialize after work and invariably discuss work during social gatherings. People listen in to other people talking in the same room. This applies to vision, strategy, performance, goals, direction, culture, mentorship, processes, deviations, competition, industry etc. This information osmosis is taken for granted in a single office environment and is critical to the functioning of the organization.

Anywhere between 30-60% of a team's information percolation maybe taking place in this ad-hoc manner. Since this form of communication is unstructured, it is taken for granted and its existence is not palpable. Therefore its absence is not easily detected. Many a projects fail / get delayed due to lack of information percolation amongst geographically distributed teams and yet one can't put their finger on the reasons for failure, simply because unstructured and unplanned information flow, though critical, is taken for granted and is not directly visible.

Individuals split across geography, cannot partake in this auto-info-dispersal, resulting in lesser information dispersion through informal ad-hoc channels. Therefore organizations that have multiple offices must substitute the lack of informal ad-hoc channels by adding more structured meetings, dialogues, discussions to achieve the same level of information flow

This can be achieved by using various tools and implementing certain processes -

Organize regular calls

• Organize regular video-conference / teleconference calls to discuss status and provide updates
• Remember, the frequency of these should be adequate to make up for the absence of the multiple (3-4) random ad-hoc conversations that would take place if these teams were in the same location
• Do not skimp on these even if there is nothing to discuss. Ideally these should be conducted over video-conferencing. Just catching up face to face for a few minutes everyday adds significant value within a team.
• One can use a daily standups format of the agile world to conduct these daily meetings

Participants need to make a protracted effort

• Ad-hoc conversation flows naturally and impromptu. If a team member thinks of something to say, they say it, then and there, in the room. When individuals meet in the corridors, just seeing each other multiple times in a day, can cause them to recall important items they want to discuss
• However without these chance meetings and interactions, individuals must be disciplined to jot down their thoughts / queries / notes either on email / chat / mailing lists, or as an agenda for the next day's meeting. Do not depend on your memory to bring up all relevant topics for discussion at the next face to face meeting. Individuals must make it a point to maintain a list of items that they wish to talk about. At the least one may simply shoot out multiple one-liner mails to the relevant individuals / lists the moment one thinks of something that needs to be discussed.

Leverage Instant Messaging

• Ensure everyone is always available online on IM
• At Directi, we have dedicated chatrooms per project, team, business unit etc
• If a single team is divided across multiple locations, all team members should remain logged in to their team/project chat room for their entire workday and post updates / notes / details to this chat room. Think of the chat room as an actual room, and anything that you may typically share with individuals in the same physical location - is a candidate for chatroom fodder

Use Mailing lists profusely

• Mailing Lists are a time-tested tool for communication
• At Directi we have mailing lists per project, team and business unit
• Some mailing lists can get very noisy, which is the way we like it. Mailing Lists make it very easy to remain in touch. Communication posted to mailing lists can be read at leisure. People are used to skip reading their email (as opposed to IM). One can create custom rules for different types of mailing list messages. Mailing list messages also get archived and are available for future reference through indexed searches
• Team members (especially those that are geographically dispersed) should make daily postings to respective mailing lists. These can be updates, documentation, interesting links, analysis, rants, questions, answers, communication, clarifications - pretty much anything concerning a project / product
• Infact any information that one thinks will be mildly usable to others in their team should be posted out to their team / project mailing lists
• I would go so far as to say that teams should use mailing lists as their scratch pads. If they jot down any thoughts they should mail them out to the team mailing list.

Invest in video conferencing

• I have spent a ton of my personal time in investigating video conferencing equipment and performing due diligence on various options available in the market. We eventually decided to spend extra $$ and go in for high-def 720p video conferencing between all locations.
• Our goal is to provide video conferencing facilities to every single team, and implement processes that make it very easy to communicate with teams in other locations

Team-twitter

Twitter is by far one of the most simplest and yet the most powerful applications on the web today. Team members should leverage twitter or twitter like services (there are dozens of them) to post single line updates on their work on a continuous basis, multiple times during the day. I know many other project management tools that provide this functionality too (eg software from 37signals). Single line updates hardly take up any time. One can install desktop clients which make it quite easy to provide status updates, and they add considerable value in keeping all team members in sync, setting a pace and a maintaining a heartbeat within the team.

Leverage Wikis

Directi has always been heavy on internal knowledge sharing. A few years ago, after a fair bit of investigation we switched our internal knowledge and document repository to a Wiki. Individual participation in creating a corporate corpus of knowledge has sky rocketed since then. We use wiki spaces for recording pretty much ALL information at Directi. On an average close to 1000 new pages of information are added every month across all our wiki spaces.

Write-a-lot

Many people are habituated to talk more than to write. What people fail to understand is information in a conversation is volatile. It serves an immediate purpose but does not result in any permanent record that can be referenced in the future. Additionally, talking is not always an option for geo-distributed offices, especially ones with non-overlapping timezones.

Individuals should make it a habit to write things down. Whether it is thoughts, ideas, notes, bookmarks, training material, requirements, impact analysis - make it a practice to write things down and then share them - through blogs, wikis, mailing lists - any relevant mediums. Every individual should make it a practice to make a written contribution in some way or another everyday.

Involve everyone in structured Meetings and Training sessions

• In many distributed teams, it is often easy to organize a quick meeting or training session amongst individuals at a single location, leaving folks in other locations out, resulting in a communication gap.
• Always strive to engage everyone involved in a meeting, including individuals in remote locations, ideally over video conferencing
• At Directi we make it a practice to video almost every pertinent meeting and upload the video to our central wiki so that it can be accessed by individuals who were in another location, or who were absent
• Prefer planned meetings with decent advance notice as opposed to unplanned ones so that remote participation can be arranged for in advance
• Always have someone take down the minutes of any meeting and circulate the same on the relevant mailing lists.

Culture and process percolation

Typically remote offices start out small. This means lesser individuals, lesser managers, and lesser experience with respect to your culture and processes. Some of the strategies that help in culture / process percolation are -

Seed the office with some veterans

When starting a new office, it may help to try and seed each new office with a few existing individuals from the older one. If you can spare senior resources to do this, it is even better. You will find enough takers who are upto the challenge of setting up a new office in a new location and are willing to relocate for a near term period

Ensure that Managers are well acquainted with your culture and processes

Spend time with seniors and Managers at remote locations in order to acquaint them with our culture and processes. Ensure that they take initiative to spot any deviations and rectify them immediately.

Clearly communicate that everyone is responsible

Deviations from processes / culture are first spotted by individuals in the trenches rather than managers. It is therefore most crucial that every individual at every location knows that they are individually responsible for maintaining the organization's culture, environment, processes etc and that any deviation they spot is their responsibility to rectify. This may involve bringing the same to the notice of their manager or the management or any other agencies involved, even multiple times if required, until the deviation is fixed.