Tips to efficiently work in a geographically dispersed project team
Remote collaboration can be hard, especially for a software project team. It takes time for people to adapt to this working style. After a year and a half working at Feedzai, I’ve gathered some tips that may be helpful for those who decide to take a new step and join a geographically dispersed team.
At Feedzai, every Customer Success team consists of a Delivery Engineer, a Tech Lead, a Data Scientist and a Project Manager. Since we have expanded our business to the US and APAC, it is quite common to have people from different offices joining the same team. And all of a sudden, collaborating remotely in an efficient manner becomes a practical issue that needs to be resolved in order to guarantee project efficiency.
Here are some tips to dealing with different time zones:
1) Minimize scheduling meetings. If that’s not possible, make the most of them
If you’re working in a dispersed team, you will realize communication is costly. Since each team member has distinct working hours, the available time slots for meetings are limited. This may decrease the quality of the meeting because you may start your day full of energy while your colleagues are already exhausted from coding the whole day.
Replacing not-so-urgent meetings with another way of communication is the way to go. Slack, email, Confluence…you name it. This helps syncing the team and aides newcomers to quickly catch up on the project status.
If the meeting is unavoidable, minimize the duration. Prepare meeting notes in advance with a brief decision tree and do a reasonable amount of research regarding all of the options you want to present from those notes. Never join a meeting with empty notes. They will help you stay focused on the issue while you’re discussing with your team.
With the support of a decision tree, the meeting will turn into a series of binary questions of “yes” and “no,” with a reason. This helps you not only cut a regular 20-minute meeting to 10 minutes, but also reach to a decision within the allotted time.
Check the following example:
2) Don’t shy away from doing a proof of concept: a small demo is better than a thousand words
During work day, you may find yourself in a situation with multiple choices and you will need advice from your peers. Let’s imagine your peers are not available due to different time zones. You have the following ways to proceed with the task:
- Write minimal lines of code for a demo to showcase your idea — 15 minutes.
- Schedule a meeting with them when they are available — 10 minutes.
You may ask yourself: “Is it worth spending 15 minutes producing a demo to demonstrate the idea? I can just talk to my peers as soon as they are available.” The main issue here is that since you’re dealing with a geographically dispersed team, your discussions will most likely be done on a 1-on-1 level basis. Yet, by writing down the idea in the form of a demo, you actually allow the whole team to participate, thus enabling communication among all peers.They can leave comments whenever they wish to. By doing so, you get the most out of your peers’ availability.
3) Avoid being blocked and maximize your contribution
This is also a key point that I’ve learned. By working in different time zones, peers may not be available when you need them. For instance, it may be necessary to use the support of a Tech Lead during a task. In this case, there is definitely no point in being blocked and waiting until they are online, as this may take a couple of hours. In this situation instead of working on a task sequentially, working on it parallelly is the way to go. This kind of workflow can be implemented via Trello, as shown in the image below:
Whenever I blocked by a task, I start by checking what’s causing it. Does it require peers to advise? Or should the decision be made by the team? If that is the case, the task will move to the pending section along with a reason. At the same time, I start working on another task, until the pending task is unblocked and I am able to resume work. Switching tasks helps me maximize my contribution and output throughout the day.
Final thoughts
Despite all the technical issues, having a positive mindset is key. For instance, caring about your peers and how they are doing is important. Also, it is important that you accept that if colleagues don’t respond promptly, they are most likely busy with other stuff. It’s critical to not become bothered by these challenges.Because at the end of the day, they are trying their best to bring value to the company, as much as you are.
And again, don’t let the geographic distance or time zone difference limit you. We all work as one team and contribute towards a common goal. Don’t hesitate to initiate casual conversation or a short call when you feel like talking. It doesn’t need to be work related. Just like those casual conversations that happen in the office social area, a bit of joy will always spark your day.
