I have been working in distributed or remote environments (DRE) since 2003 approximately. I started back in the Canary Islands using IRC, wikis, ticketing systems, mailing lists…all designed to work remotely, avoiding VPNs.

A few years later I moved to the mainland of Spain and the situation in this regard became even more complex. I managed ASOLIF, a fully distributed organization back then.

Later in my career I have worked from companies headquarters but my teams or department were distributed or fully remote. Now at Codethink, a UK based company where 2/3 of the staff is located in Manchester, I work from home and travel frequently, visiting the office around once a quarter.

At Codethink I (am) have participated in Open Source projects driven by consortiums like the Linux Foundation or GENIVI. Currently I am helping on BuildStream, an Open Source project that creates an integration tool-set. They are distributed or fully remote environments.

In summary, I have worked as a manager, consultant, executive or owner in several organizations with a variety of DRE. A few weeks back I attended to a talk at OpenSouthCode about working remotely from home and I left it thinking that it might be a good idea to share what I have learnt on this topic, what it has not worked for me and what I haven’t tried, so others can tell me if I should. New ideas are always welcome.

But above all, my goal is to write down what I end up explaining over and over again to those I work with when they have little or no experience working in distributed or remote environments. I find very useful to send those people links to read and ask them for their thoughts afterwards instead of telling them the same story over and over again.

One of the things that calls my attention is the lack of a significant number of good books on the topic. One of the good ones is listed in the Reads section of my site but some of the topics I want to cover are not thereeither. There are several good blog posts though, but most of them are written from the remote person point of view, not the team, department or organization manager/executive point of view. I will list some links to good articles in further posts.

Definitions

Let me clarify what I mean by distributed environments and remote environments:

• Distributed environment: I will refer to distributed environments to organizations that have several offices or sites, not when the employees or contractors are working from home. In general, those people based at the office that travel or work from home only partially will be consider also under this category.
• Remote: I will refer to remote for those setups where the employee/contractor is working at her own place, a co-working… in no company site, with no other company member co-located.
• DRE: distributed or remote environments.

Please, help me.

I would like to hear from you about topics you might be interested about that I can cover in this series, in addition of the ones I have in mind. Feel free to propose them so I wrote about them. I would also welcome references to blog posts or books on the topic that you have found useful, so I read them and avoid repetition, referencing them in this blog and my Reads section.

If you have a wide experience on this topic, maybe we can write the article together and publish it here or somewhere else.

Articles

The articles related with managing distributed or remote teams so far are:

• Short, daily meetings: article about the substitute to stand-ups when working in DRE.
• The calendar: article with tips and ideas on how to use the calendar in distributed or remote organizations.
• Weekly meetings: two articles providing tips and experiences about how to run team meetings in distributed and remote environments. Article I and article II.
• One on ones: advices based on toscalix´s experience running 1:1s remotely.