I have a lot of experience running software team meetings with a lot of remote participants dialing in to a conference line. When a big chunk of your team is distributed, it’s important to get on the phone sometimes and hear each other’s voices. But these calls can be really hard to manage.
There’s nothing worse than being the remote participant on a conference call and struggling to make out the murmured conversations taking place in the conference room thousands of miles away — where the “main” participants are all sitting together, suddenly laughing about something you didn’t hear or understand. How is this a good use of your time? You had to get up early for this because you’re in the “wrong” time zone, and now you’re listening to the teacher in Charlie Brown.
On the SUSE Studio team, we had a “level playing field” rule for our weekly meetings. Even though a lot of us were clustered in Nürnberg, Germany, everyone dialed in to the meeting, putting every single person on an even footing. There’s no “local” and “remote.” Everyone has to speak clearly into the telephone.
When we instituted this rule, we noticed the “remote” participants joining in the conversation a lot more often, and the calls went a lot smoother.
This worked well for us. It might help you too. Let me know how it goes.
Posted on 24 April 2010
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At litl we usually use a video conference system for our dev team and “all hands” meetings. My impression is that the use of video eases the local-remote problem – even when most of the team is in the same room and the others are scattered in different locations.
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In our case, so many people on our team worked from home 4 out of 5 days a week that we ended up with this rule by default.
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And, in the case of the SUSE and Ximian teams, in my experience, IRC was also a great unificator — like having the whole team in a permanent unified room.
Just a footnote since you obviously already know
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I am doing the same with my team at SUSE, with one small add-on …
As the team is small, we are not using a conference system, but I just call everyone and merge them to the conference.This skips the usual 5 minutes waiting for everyone joining the call.
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That’s a pretty cool idea. Getting everyone to dial in. I might consider that for our team meetings.
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I do like the ‘everyone dial in’ approach. I’m a project manager and try to ensure that all remote meetings have two way webcams and desktop sharing for everyone.
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Massive overkill. Better: reduce meetings by making sure *every* meeting has an agenda posted in advance, and remove things from the agenda when they get resolved in response to posting the agenda. You’ll end up with far fewer meetings and more focused time spent in the meetings you do have.
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