Many timezones, one team – how do you stand up?

http://engineering.freeagent.com/2016/01/06/many-timezones-one-team/

by sarcas • 11 years ago

15 8 11 years ago

engineering.freeagent.com

mikewhy• 11 years ago

Not sure if it will fit your use case, but this was on HN a little while ago:

https://www.standupmail.com/

sarcas2• 11 years ago

Oh that's interesting. It looks like it would cover some of requirements (ie by presenting everyone with a list of stand up notes). I wonder if you can schedule when your 'day' starts with stand up mail on a team member by team member basis, since that's one of the problems we were trying to solve. I'll dig into it, thank you!

Since the events of the blog post we've been experimenting with some similar steps, which have been working quite well. I hope to write them up soon.

lylo• 11 years ago

Many years ago we experimented with using iDoneThis https://idonethis.com/ at FreeAgent. Standup Mail looks really similar, but with a much better name ;-)

kissmd• 11 years ago

we have teams in UK (-1), Hungary and China(+6), so basically the same setup.

We do standups in UK morning so EU members have a morning standup and China members have a 'day closing' standup: "today i did..., tomorrow i will begin with ...".

works like a charm.

sarcas2• 11 years ago

That sounds like a great solution, and isn't something we've tried yet. What's the team spread like? Are you folk fairly cross-functional? As in do you have members of the same team in each of the countries? And if you do, is the split fairly even (2 from each for example)?

I might suggest we trial what you're doing on Monday.

rajuru• 11 years ago

We used to work in +6 and -5 (or -4) timezone. Given no overlapping work hours, it was pretty difficult to do it. So one person from either team volunteered and proxy the team during odd hours standup (and we rotated each week which side will join at odd hours). However, later we've converted to collocated teams which is working greatly.

There is still someone (now specifically product owners) who bridges between both sides but both team now feel better sense of ownership as they their separate responsibilities in same product.

_droptable_• 11 years ago

While the question is interesting, unfortunately the article didn't really present a good solution. At least I would have liked to see the results of more than one approach rather than just the one presented (which isn't really a solution IMHO).

MCRed• 11 years ago

He tripped and fell into the solution-- and then didn't recognize it.

Everything conveyed in a standup is covered by your project tracker (what you did, what you're working on, and where you're stuck) and discussion can happen in your team chat.

Async development is the way to go. If you're having a standup, you're wasting time. And it doesn't work if you're distributed.

The issue tracking really shows what the status si. IF you're stuck, you assign the issue to someone to help you fix it, or you ask in the team chat room.

Keeping abreast of what's going on in the chat room keeps you abreast of the status of the team. The kanban board records it.

Many timezones, one team – how do you stand up?

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