It’s never simple to manage a project with a client or a team located in different time zones. Risks of miscommunication, unnecessary overtime, lack of information or working unproductively are high, with the potential to jeopardize the success of a collaboration.
Being in the same time zone with your team or your client would obviously make things easier on a daily basis — though with globalization and the increasing trend of gig economies, this has become increasingly rare. This is especially true for Ekohe, located in four major cities around the world (Shanghai, Tokyo, Paris & Vancouver), with team members coming from five different countries. We love our diversity and international presence, but it’s not always easy for our project managers to handle clients and projects across time zones. To prevent the pitfalls above, our excellent team of project managers follow key principles that help drive our teams, and thus our projects, to success.
1. Use Collaborative Tools
At Ekohe, we’re huge fans of collaborative communication and project management tools, such as Slack and Gitlab. The free Google suite of products (docs, drive, sheets, meeting, etc.) have been life-savers in terms of collaborative remote work. Using cloud-based documents means that multiple users can create, edit, and comment all at the same time (with changes tracked for each user), despite being in different locations. Best of all, everyone has access to the latest changes. Google Docs, for example, is a great tool for taking notes during conference calls since multiple users can take notes on the same document, alleviating the burden on a single person.
GitLab is another great project management tool that helps our project managers plan sprints and keep track of the team’s progress. Using custom labels have helped organize our tasks by priorities, task-type, and feature-type. With GitLab, we’re also able to create two-week milestones for the team to have visibility on the various finish-lines of the project. While we prefer to use GitLab, there are plenty of other project management programs available, such as Jira, Trello and Asana.
Sharing a single cloud-based calendar, such as Google Calendar, has also been incredibly helpful in planning meetings across different offices and locations. Every invitation is sent in the correct time zone automatically. You can even add a secondary time-zone view within your calendar to easily identify the “golden hours” (the valuable hours when both the local and remote teams are working at the same time). Another similar tool is the World Clock Meeting Planner, which lets you add multiple cities and highlights which time slots would work for every participant in a meeting:
At Ekohe, we have a consolidated “holidays” calendar for all of the offices, as well as upcoming days off for every staff member. We also receive notifications by e-mail, sent by each city’s respective office managers to notify us in advance of office holiday closures. It’s important to keep everyone’s working schedule in mind when planning your project and when discussing deadlines with your client.
Lastly, using a real-time team-based messaging service, such as Slack, has eased our communications tremendously. Not only are we able to create “channels” to group all the members of a specific project together (so announcements can be made and alerted to the entire team at once), we’re also able to screen-share during video calls. Users can even share control of the screen and “draw” on it so everyone can easily see what the speaker is referring to.
2. Communicate Clearly and Often
It’s pretty easy to quickly hold impromptu meetings to talk through a problem with a designer or developer when everyone’s working in the same office. However, this is much harder in Ekohe’s case as our teams are spread across different offices. Having set weekly meetings allows everyone on the team to collaborate on the priorities for the week and to share their progress, in addition to addressing questions that inevitably arise throughout the project. However, we can’t expect our team members to wait until the next weekly meeting before talking about problems that may arise mid-week.
This is where daily stand-ups can benefit the whole team. By simply taking 10 minutes every day at a mutually convenient time to convene and discuss what everyone has done / will do, problems can be solved more efficiently in an organized manner.
For items that arise spontaneously, we can address these by email if the issue at hand is detailed and clear. To discuss more complicated questions, nothing can replace a call to go through each issue and provide direct feedback to your team, especially if it’s time sensitive. While having a written record of communications by email is extremely important, talking aloud through a question can save you and your team (not to mention your client) a lot of time. Just don’t forget to jot down a summary of the call after it’s over.
3. Have Clear Plans of Action
In order to successfully manage projects across time zones, having coherent plans of action is imperative. Not only should we be clear about long-term goals, but we should also have attainable short-term goals every two weeks to break down the project. This is the idea behind sprints in Agile project management. Having small, digestible tasks that can be completed within a short time frame focuses the team and allows the members to see tangible results from their progress. Weekly sprint meetings set achievable goals for the sprint, ideally by the order of priority. The team should understand what each feature is for and its specific use-cases for maximum clarity.
Since we perform stand-ups every day with our colleagues working in the same office, why not do the same thing with your team working remotely? Scrum principles should still be followed. Daily stand-ups provide further accountability and allow the team to remain agile and flexible. If any blocking issues come up, we address them on a daily basis and can shift priorities and work accordingly.
For instance, a quick daily stand-up on Slack in your project channel to make sure priorities for the day are clear is very useful and should not be underestimated. It’s important to keep in mind that what may be clear to the Project Manager may not be as clear for the rest of the team, especially in a project across time zones.
4. Celebrate Results
With Agile methodology, a new feature easily drives out other features. It’s easy to forget to share results and celebrate achievements enough with our team members in different offices for practical reasons. Thus, teams may feel less coherent across time zones and locations. It’s essential for team morale to keep everyone updated on the product, especially on the client and end-users’ feedback.
Once a project is delivered, it’s great to send a summary review of the project to the entire team. Include an assessment of everyone’s work, as well as clients’ feedback, what worked / what could be improved, and most importantly, congratulate everyone on a job well done!
As part of the same team, we achieve far more working as a coherent unit. Using collaborative tools, communicating clearly, maximizing golden hours, and setting clear priorities together are key principles to follow when managing projects across different time zones. Despite the difficulties inherent in being in multiple time zones, the tools and principles we discussed above can make a project manager’s — and ultimately the entire team’s — experience much less challenging and hopefully more enjoyable!
