Comments on: Everyone dials in

By: The dispersed retrospective | Wide Teams

The dispersed retrospective | Wide Teams — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 14:21:58 +0000

[...] if a large group of team members are all in the same building together, make sure everyone dials in, so that everyone is on equal [...]

By: 10 skills to master to get things done online « Stormy's Corner

10 skills to master to get things done online « Stormy's Corner — Fri, 14 May 2010 16:14:29 +0000

[...] good technology and make sure everyone is on the phone, not just some people. I think Nat’s Everyone Dials In policy is an excellent one. Also be aware that conference calls are particularly difficult for [...]

By: Novell: Making IT Work As One Microsoft Way | Techrights

Novell: Making IT Work As One Microsoft Way | Techrights — Sat, 08 May 2010 21:30:29 +0000

[...] post for this week) and his colleague from Microsoft (Nat Friedman temporarily worked there) is still involved with SUSE, even after leaving Novell. On the SUSE Studio team, we had a “level playing field” rule for [...]

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 07:31:11 +0000

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.

By: robert

robert — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 16:03:34 +0000

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.

By: FergatROn

FergatROn — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 00:14:44 +0000

That’s a pretty cool idea. Getting everyone to dial in. I might consider that for our team meetings.

By: Marcus Meissner

Marcus Meissner — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 23:28:44 +0000

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.

By: F2

F2 — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 23:20:52 +0000

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

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 22:50:15 +0000

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.

By: Lucas Rocha

Lucas Rocha — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 21:36:52 +0000

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.