Full Circle Associates

Jim Benson shares his company's distributed collaboration configuration - the set of tools and processes they use to work regardless of who is "in the office!" Where's William?

"In order to maintain cohesion, the group uses the following types of tools:

Communications

1. Skype - Most holy Skype allows us to have a common stand up meeting every day at 9 am in Seattle and 6 PM in Paris. It allows the group to have immediate voice, IM and file transfer contact any time of day.

2. Trillian - As nice as Skype is, being in constant contact on Trillian gives us a great depth of historic tools. We can text chat and search or organize those chats in a number of ways.

Project Management

1. Version One - We have started using Version One an un-cheap Agile Project Management tool that allows the entire team constant access to everything in our release plan. The system holds all features and tasks to be created and tracks responsibilities, estimates, hours work, velocity and all those other Agile niceties.

2. GHS Wiki - Still under development, this Wiki holds the written record of GHS processes. Our coding standards, our tool sets, what to download, where to get it, how to install it, what we do with it. Of course, this will always be a work in progress.

Collaboration

1. Groove - Previously a Ray Ozzie package, now Groove is part of Office 2007. In the first part of the project, Groove helped us finish key tasks well under budget by keeping GHS completely transparent with our client. All documents were on Groove - which is a peer to peer system - so the moment we saved something in Word, the client received it. The nice thing about Groove is that since it is peer to peer, it is also invasive. When something is saved, they get an alert. This is very different than something being on Sharepoint or Jotspot, where the client has the luxury of ignoring things.

2. del.icio.us - While the group is researching things on-line, bookmarks are tagged and then form a common research repository for the group.

Coding

1. Subversion - Our source control is very important. The development tools should be commonly available so that our distributed team never is estranged from the code.

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So Seven Simple Tools create a bedrock upon which William can spend 10 weeks in Paris with minimal impact to the project. Of course, we've had some growing pains easing into things - but in 20 years of consulting I've found all new teams and projects have an initial period of adjustment.

The kicker is that on Thursday, I'm going to Hong Kong for three weeks. William and I come back to the States on the same day. I'll still be there for our morning scrum at 9 am (10 PM in HK). I'll still be working just as William has.

But these technologies have allowed flexibility. William can share Europe with Ryan and I can be there for my family obligations in HK."

How aware are teams/groups/networks of their technology configurations? Who stewards them in your life? How consistent are they across the membership? I expect teams to have fairly tight consistency, and networks to have just enough to connect members.

These are the sorts of questions we have started to surface in the "who-knows-when-we'll-finish-it" report on Technologies for Communities, so it is great to read Jim's description of his. Thanks, Jim.