Social Glass

I’ve been in Xi’an, China this week meeting my offshore team for the first time. The picture here is of the parking lot walking into the office (the doorway is underneath the red letters). This is the first time I’ve ever been to China, and other than feeling like I’ve been smoking a pack of cigarettes every day this place has truly impressed me. There is construction everywhere, and the people are fashionable and optimistic about their bright economic future.

One of the items on my agenda was figuring out how to do agile software development with remote teams. This has been a challenging task, as agile wants constant communication, and in-person at that. Time zones and language barriers are certainly enemies to agile.

But I came across a great article from Martin Fowler discussing how Thoughtworks does agile with its remote team in India. One of the many points he makes is to use wikis to contain common information:

Any common information can be put there, story cards, design guidelines, build instructions, notes on progress - anything that needs to be written down for reference by the team. We’ve found it’s very useful to use the change notification capability that many wikis have, so that page changes trigger notifications through email or an RSS feed.

I think this should be extended to include other Enterprise 2.0 technologies. One of the primary ways to be successful with an offshore team is to build personal relationships that engender trust. Social computing is a good option here. Onshore and Offshore teams should blog about what they did on the weekend, upload pictures of their pets or the vacation they just went on, discuss ongoing projects, exchange ideas, etc. These activities help project the human element of each team member and build bonds that will come in handy under work-related pressure situations.

I will leave China with a renewed passion to implement Enterprise 2.0 for my team.

I’ll also leave with renewed respect for how good the Chinese are at crossing the street at busy intersections.

Since this is a blog that “covers the transparent enterprise”, I thought I might include a presentation I put together about SCRUM - a collaborative and transparent way to build software applications.