Joined up working

I think it’s best if you have teams that are in the same location since meetings are easier to arrange and have fluid communication.

If you are in the same office, you can have ad-hoc face-to-face communication. You can all go into a meeting room and don’t need any conference-call equipment which can have all kinds of problems; disconnecting, low audio quality. Same time-zones means there are more hour slots available to arrange meetings in.

I’ve heard people imply that teams end up being distributed just so that the other offices feel like they “feel part of it”/feel integrated into the company. Yet giving them a dedicated project they are responsible for would probably achieve that better; they will have more responsibility/autonomy. Adding members from the main development office makes it feel like they are been supervised.

Many times, you rely on a third party of some kind (by third party, this could be another team within the company or a different company). Maybe the third party collects the data and you just retrieve it via an API. You don’t really care about how the data got there, just that you can use it and it works accurately. Your team that wrote the user interface feel like they have achieved something. The team that collated the data and provided the API feel like they have achieved something. The teams may only need to communicate for a minor part of it. The teams need to know the overall aim, and what parameters they need for the API. My point here is that you can have two different teams with some minor collaboration, but both feel like they have contributed massively to the overall goal of the project.

I think adding a remote worker for the hell of it is just inefficient. Unless they are exceptional and can’t be replaced by the talent you have locally, then its just adding in unnecessary inefficiencies and causing unnecessary bottlenecks (have to delay meetings due to time-zones), have to wait until the next working day to get a response, different countries having different National Holidays.