Assembla rebutted my so-called-rebuttal on distributed work. But Andy Singleton apparently doesn’t know how Socialtext has been distributed across its five year history. He is absolutely right that making it work is not optional, 85% of workers connect with a distributed colleague.
Ok, now we’re having a conversation. Like most work, we do it in a distributed fashion. Our development and support teams are distributed and our methods are agile. Our products are Open Source, and if you want to see how we do our work just look at the wiki.
Yeah, we probably could be better at managing distributed teams, but we are working on it, and what I’m doing is sharing learnings based on experience. We started with four co-founders in three states and only created an office for the management and marketing function two years ago. Our office is the wiki, our hallway is the IRC channel, meeting rooms on Skype and Asterix. We don’t eat our own dogfood, we drink our own champagne. It makes the product better and we wrestle with the issues that are the future of work every day.
Being distributed effectively isn’t an either/or situation, its more optimally an and. Even Open Source development communities thrive on F2F interaction, like the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop this weekend.
The simple fact is that distributed workers work better with some face-to-face interaction. That some work is done better face-to-face, and some is not. That distribution is a tool and there are better practices for using it that everyone is still discovering.
You can learn a lot about collaboration methodologies from Open Source, as Andy suggests. Take for example, his post suggesting that due dates are a waste of time. It isn’t this statement that is interesting about Open Source methodologies, but how in an Agile contract between provider and customer you can trust through transparency, communication and tight iteration suspend deadlines, and the result will be of better quality, closer to requirements, less expensive and in many cases, faster. Building this trust is the main challenge. Coupling it to existing business processes, and the demands of event oriented organizational units such as sales and marketing, let alone pressure markets put towards quarterly cycles is a close second.
Now, Assembla is rightly selling in the earliest market for such methods and tools, developing software. It wont be long until it is more widely distributed, but until then we wont be so evenly distributed.
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