Distributed Teams

Can you have a meaningful, well-paid career without a daily commute to a physical office, and without burning out? Can your team or organization work well together and maintain team culture, even when physically apart? Can your organization's "work from home" policy be a competitive advantage--improving organizational resilience while also addressing important social, diversity, urban planning and environmental issues? If you find yourself asking questions like these, this book is for you. This updated second edition features best practices from over 28 years working in, leading, and coaching globally distributed organizations--as well as lessons learned helping organizations quickly shift to fully distributed during COVID-19 office closures. Each short easy-to-read chapter has practical takeaways on what did--and did not--work from my own hard-learned lessons, along with a wide range of interviews with company founders, hedge fund managers, government agency leaders, software developers, accountants, political organizers, recruiters, military personnel, executive assistants and medical technicians.

The age of the distributed team is upon us. Teams can now operate and collaborate from locations other than a central office, and events surrounding the 2020 COVID pandemic have thrown its practicality into sharp relief. Managing a team whose members are distributed across several locations requires a different mindset and will remain a must-have for all areas of business from this point forward. Building and Managing High-Performance Distributed Teams explains what the distributed teams concept means to the future of your company. Author Alberto S. Silveira Jr. leverages his industry knowledge to explore why the high-performance distributed team model is vital to the future of business, and explains how to build and maintain one through times of change. You will learn to differentiate between distributed teams, remote work, offshoring, and what each means in a modern context. Silveira also weaves in stories from his other life as a boater and sailor, using analogies and lessons gained from humankind’s thousands of years of maritime adventure to illustrate the value of well-managed teams, and to also convey the importance of life-work balance in today’s working world. The book analyzes team management strategies from some of the great successes and failures in recent years so that you can learn from the experiences of others. Building and Managing High-Performance Distributed Teams is your definitive guide for building a dynamic distributed team, using collaboration technology to attract and engage the most important element of any business—your people. Whether you are a department head, a business owner, or a team leader, this book presents the no-nonsense knowledge you need now to chart your course for success. What You Will Learn Understand what the new era of connected business means, and the role distributed teams will play. Differentiate between distributed teams, remote work, nearshore, and offshoring, and what each means to modern business. Discover the true heart of a high-performance distributed team (hint: it’s not the technology). Find out what the era of distributed teams means to existing infrastructure. Uncover what we can learn about team management from some of the great successes and failures of recent years. Appreciate the techniques honed by seafarers, pilots, and software designers combined to create a successful project plan for team management and company navigation. Comprehend the effective simplicity of the “power of three” in building successful teams. Apply proven techniques of measurement and metrics without leaving the human factor behind to improve team morale and productivity. Who This Book Is For Team leaders or officers of small-ish companies, with populations in the tens through to the mid-hundreds. It’s also for managers of somewhat autonomous departments within larger companies, and for everyone else in the boat because everyone in a company ultimately needs to know what being in a distributed team is all about.

This is the digital version of the printed book (Copyright © 2010). All software projects face the challenges of diverse distances -- temporal, geographical, cultural, lingual, political, historical, and more. Many forms of distance even affect developers in the same room. The goal of this book is to reconcile two mainstays of modern agility: the close collaboration agility relies on, and project teams distributed across different cities, countries, and continents. In Agile Software Development with Distributed Teams, Jutta Eckstein asserts that, in fact, agile methods and the constant communication they require are uniquely capable of solving the challenges of distributed projects. Agility is responsiveness to change -- in other words, agile practitioners maintain flexibility to accommodate changing circumstances and results. Iterative development serves the learning curve that global project teams must scale. This book is not about how to outsource and forget your problems. Rather, Eckstein details how to carefully select development partners and integrate efforts and processes to form a better product than any single contributor could deliver on his or her own. The author de-emphasizes templates and charts and favors topical discussion and exploration. Practitioners share experiences in their own words in short stories throughout the book. Eckstein trains readers to be change agents, to creatively apply the concepts in this book to form a customized distributed project plan for success. Topics include: Understanding Distributed Development The Productivity Myth Ensuring Conceptual Integrity Trust and Mutual Respect Iterations and Releases Using Features to Steer the Development Effort Team Velocity Virtual Retrospectives Dispersed Synchronization Introducing Agility to Global Projects and much more

"This book summarizes the challenges inherent in leading distributed teams and explores practices that are emerging to optimize distributed team performance"--Provided by publisher.

Distributed agile teams have a terrible reputation. They don’t deliver “on time,” and too often, they don’t deliver what the customer needs. However, most agile teams, have at least one remote team member. And, agile approaches are here to stay. Don’t blindly apply agile practices designed for collocated teams. Instead, learn to use three mindset shifts and the agile and lean principles to create your successful distributed agile team. Use the tips and traps to help your team succeed. Leave the chaos of virtual teams behind. See how to help your distributed team succeed.

The background and interwoven streams of team cognition and distributed cognition fermenting together has wielded new nuances of exploration, which continue to be relevant for a theoretical understanding of team phenomena. Foundations and Theoretical Perspectives of Distributed Teams Cognition looks at fundamentals, theoretical concepts, and how theory informs perspectives of thinking for distributed team cognition. The chapters yield a broad understanding of the nature of diverse thinking and insights into technologies, foundations, and theoretical perspectives of distributed team cognition. Features Generates historical patterns and significance that compose developmental trajectories Explains multiple perspectives that incorporate an interdisciplinary understanding that specifies diverse theories Identifies and develops particular challenges resident within team simulation studies and then illustrates research frameworks Highlights and reviews how team simulations are used to produce dynamic experimental results Investigates and studies research variables within distributed team cognition

Contemporary society is held together by interactive groups and teams carrying out work to accomplish various intentions and purposes often within challenging and ill-defined environments. Cooperative work is accomplished through the synergy of human teamwork and technological innovation within domains such as health and medicine; cyber security; transportation; command, control, communication, and intelligence; aviation; manufacturing; criminal justice; space exploration; and emergency crisis management. Distributed team cognition is ubiquitous across and within each of these domains in myriad ways. The Handbook of Distributed Team Cognition provides three volumes that delve into the intricacies of research findings in terms of how cognition is embodied within specific environments while being distributed across time, space, information, people, and technologies. Distributed team cognition is examined from broad, interdisciplinary perspectives and developed using different themes and worldviews. Foundations and Theoretical Perspectives of Distributed Teams Cognition provides an informed view of the history and foundations underlying the development of the field while looking at the theoretical significance of research. Contemporary Research: Models, Methodologies, and Measures in Distributed Team Cognition strengthens these foundations and theories by looking at how research has evolved through the use of different experiments, methods, measures, and models. Fields of Practice and Applied Solutions within Distributed Teams Cognition considers the importance of technological support of teamwork and what it means for applied systems and specific fields of practice. Together these three volumes entwine a comprehensive knowledge of distributed team cognition that is invaluable for professors, scientists, engineers, designers, specialists, and students alike who need specific information regarding history, cognitive science, experimental studies, research approaches, measures and analytics, digital collaborative technologies and intelligent agents, and real world applications; all of which have led to a dynamic revolution in cooperative work / teamwork in both theory and practice.

Many different cognitive research approaches have been generated to explore fields of practice where mutual teamwork is present and emergent. Results have shown subtle yet significant findings on how humans actually work together and when they transition from their own individual roles and niches into elements of teamwork and team-to-team work. Fields of Practice and Applied Solutions within Distributed Team Cognition explores the advantages of teams and shows how researchers can obtain a deep understanding of users/teams that are entrenched in a particular field. Interdisciplinary perspectives and transformative intersections are provided. Features Delineates contextual nuances of socio-technical environments as influencers of team cognition Provides quantitative/qualitative perspectives of distributed team cognition by demonstrating in situ interactions Reviews applied teamwork for fields of practice in medicine, cybersecurity, education, aviation, and manufacturing Generates practical examples of distributed work and how cognition develops across teams using technologies Specifies applied solutions through technologies such as robots, agents, games, and social networks