Chapter 22. Collaboration Practices for Distributed Teams

In the global marketplace of our teams and our customers, projects often have to extend collaboration into communications beyond the preferred face-to-face mode. These collaboration challenges include the following:

•   Multi-site (few locales with many people at each)

•   Distributed (many locales with few people at each)

•   Offshore (extreme distances between roles, such as customers versus developers)

In these contexts, teams find that they can’t take advantage of what Alistair Cockburn refers to as osmotic communication, the variety of sensory modalities (visual, audio, touch, sense, etc.) that provide a rich set of collaboration clues.1 Out of visual and audio contact, teams default ...

Get Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project Leaders now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.