Patterns and Practices for Distributed Teams

This post is a summary of my lessons learned from leading distributed teams.  I’ve managed distributed project teams since 2001, spanning the UK, Argentina, India, and other parts of the world.  While I preferred having everybody together on site around a whiteboard to simplify and improves communication,  flexibility with distributed teams gave me access to the right talent, wherever it may be.
Key Challenges These are some of the most common challenges I faced:

Trust
Time zone differences
Sharing state
Changes in direction that have a ripple effect
Communication overhead
Keeping everybody on the same page
Sharing knowledge across the team
Partitioning work for enough autonomy but to keep checks and balances
Lack of a whiteboard

Distance didn’t matter as much as differences in time zones.  If the time zone differences were too much, it meant  a lot more information, knowledge and state had to be packaged up and handed over.  However, when you leverage time zone differences, the experience can feel like you carry the baton forward, or, it’s like “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” where you make progress around the clock.
Success Patterns for Distributed Teams The following success patterns helped improve distributed team effectiveness:

Forming, storming, norming and performing.   The forming, storming, norming and performing lens helps remind everybody to expect that things smooth out over time.  It’s a simple maturity model for explaining how a team gels.
Proxy / On Point.  One of the most helpful patterns for cross-site communication is to have somebody act as the proxy or person on point to funnel key communication.  This is especially important when their are major time zone differences.  The additional patterns, such as the show and tell, and the Monday iterations and daily stand-ups, keep this from being a single point of failure.  Instead, it’s a focal point with some accountability when key