jason fried of 37 signals spoke at the collaboration loop conference in boston last week. you can watch the video. he addresses 4 items – team size, team location, meetings & decisions – in addition to the usual jason phrases like ‘software gets in the way’ and ‘less is more’ (if you can’t tell, i’ve heard him speak several times and while i agree on some things… others, like his seeming distaste of planning/functional spec/etc, i disagree with. but i won’t go into that now).

his team (well, the entire company) consists of 7 people. he said at one point they went across 9 time zones and even the folks who live in the same city typically see each other in the office about once a month due to different working hours or working from home. they would have been an amazing team for my thesis research!

he advises keeping your team small. small keeps the ‘noise’ down. it also decreases the chances of ending up playing telephone (the childhood game where the message gets distorted as it goes from person to person).

he advocates keeping your team away from each other. they found the more distant they were, the more work they got done b/c there wasn’t as many interruptions. this is an excellent point about virtual work IF your team works out of their homes. it’s not such a great tip if your team happens to work in different offices and there’s plenty of other people to interrupt them. i loved the bit when he says even in their offices they don’t all sit together but sit at opposite ends in order to keep the distance/no interruption thing.

jason feels meetings are toxic and symptoms of problems. he thinks the more meetings you have the more people don’t know what’s going on and that meetings should be used as a last resort. i tend to agree here (though again, not with every bit of this) especially considering a conversation i had during a job interview recently. during the interview i was told someone thought the team had communication issues and then proceeded to have like 4 meetings around how they were not communicating!! brilliant!

the last point is to make tiny decisions. decisions are progress so make them & move on. tiny decisions mean u can’t make big mistakes.

but i think my favourite take away from the speech was –

collaboration is about communication not control

excellent. this was just in passing concerning not looking for software to control or watch what your employees are doing but to faciliate communication but it’s such a great thought to end on.

one of the classic books on virtual teams is now available in downloaded format for free – virtual teams by Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps.

if you’re new to virtual teams or haven’t read this book, i suggest you download it now.

one of the academic journal search emails i receive from proquest (or something), pointed me towards an article entitled ‘Firms Tap Virtual Work Spaces to Ease Collaboration, Debate Among Scattered Employees’ by Jessica Marquez originally published in Workforce in May (22nd) 2006.

google turned up this bizarre link for the full article (i have NO CLUE why the url is ‘remodeling’ and why this article ended up there). it’s a good article though – full of examples of companies using virtual work and the savings they have encountered. a few highlights:

• the FAA began using real time (ie chat) meeting rooms with shared document facilities b/c debating rulings via email and phone caused 18-24 month delays in getting information sorted – including critical safety details! the article quotes the FAA as saying rulings make it out the door in a year tops & they have saved U$3.7mil in travel expenses plus U$2 mil in employee time. the yearly cost of the software is $U1 mil.
• a gartner report is quoted as saying companies are turning more to virtual team software b/c they are more comfy working virtually and there have been advances in the technology. it’s unclear if these numbers are from the same gartner report or elsewhere – virtual teaming software licences are projected to be U$800mil this year (2006) and U$1.4 bil in 2009.
• a city gov’t in nevada with 800 employees was using email as primary communication (sounds like both internally and externally) which allowed issues to linger, get ignored & be debated endlessly. by converting to software which sorts issues by topic, keeps history of the conversation and sends them reminders of outstanding issues, they have increased efficiency 15%.

john rhodes has a nice posting concerning social bookmarking being able to help project teams.

this makes a ton of sense and goes back to the ‘profile’ idea virtual teams should use to help team members learn about each other and build trust. seeing your bookmarks gives me an idea of what you like, what’s important to you and if i’d like to have a beer with you. as john notes, it’s also great for training. he points towards the skill of tagging but sharing bookmarks can assist in increasing team knowledge on a top – especially SHARED team knowledge!

what is the ‘right’ size for teams? recently an article in forbes quoted 4.6 people. but this article from wharton advises to look at the task the team has to accomplish, what skills & composition are needed & THEN consider size. although they certainly quote enough studies that point to 5-6 people being the ‘right’ number.

the article should just stop there. explore this size idea and stop. but it doesn’t. it tries to touch on what you need to do for a good team, including how diversity figures into all this. getting the team together to discuss how things will work, what their values are and planning processes is very briefly mentioned and then out of left field comes:

When it comes to creating a successful team, “teams that rely solely on electronic communication are less successful than those that understand why communication in person is important,” says Wittenberg. “Email is a terrible medium… . It doesn’t relate sarcasm or emotion very well, and misunderstandings can arise. There is something very important and very different about talking to someone face-to-face.”

sigh. yes, we know email communication can cause issues but saying teams relying solely on electronic communication are less successful than f2f teams is a sweeping statement (made w/o a reference). i’m def unimpressed by this article.