How to make Distributed Teams Work

Two Business Analysts with different cultural backgrounds discussing the benefits and challenges of running distributed teams…

Marcel Britsch
The Digital Business Analyst
7 min readJan 8, 2019

We’ve all been in situations where suppliers and clients alike were extolling the benefits of nearshoring, offshoring or other forms of cross-location working. And indeed there are very good reasons of why we may want to consider such resourcing strategies, but more often than not, do we find that making this work in practice, realising the benefits without introducing too much pain is harder than anticipated.

In this post, my colleague Swathi Poddar, also a business analyst and scrum master chat Distributed Teams, the benefits, related challenges and the conditions that make them wither or thrive.

Swathi Poddar is a Business Analyst and Software Consultant. She has worked and studied in the UK, US and India and is currently working for Equal Experts Pune. She can be found here.

Tl;Dr

Goes without saying: Colocated teams are easiest. But not always feasible. Globalisation and consequently distributed organisations and teams are here to stay. Be this for cost efficiencies, scale or multi-region support. So get used to it. Here is how to make them work:

  1. Hire skilled talent — cheap gets you cheap
  2. Trust your team, empower your team — micromanagement never makes for good work distributed or not
  3. Put conscious effort into forming and supporting distributed teams — it’s not happening on it’s own
  4. Create alignment on what do do and how to do it. Get your 6Cs right:
    . Create a supportive teamstruCture — find the balance between connected and decoupled
    . Offer Challenging and interesting work to all teams — do not treat offshore teams as 2nd class citizens just because they are ‘East’ or cheaper
    . Ensure conducive working culture Culture — appreciate local differences, support positive values
    . Communicate obsessively — to facilitate everything else
    Facilitate Collaboration — online and offline
    . Foster Consistency but allow for local variance — Centralise infrequent high impact issues, decentralise urgent or locally relevant decision making
  5. Allow for sufficient time and headspace for all this to happen — if you push, rush or over-manage it’s not going to work

To make this really work, you need to put the effort in. Which means you and your organisation need to be set up to to this. If you get it wrong, you will suffer all sorts of problems from inefficiencies to quality issues. If you get it right, it will make your delivery faster and better.

And here for the discerning reader:

When we say Distributed Teams, how does that look like?

S: Maybe it’s because I am from India, but I have basically only ever worked in distributed teams. And I have seen them work and fail.

Without taking the conclusion away, I think success has nothing to do with distributed teams as such but how you run your teams.

I have worked for a UK public sector client where delivery teams were distributed across UK and India, while the client product owners and our delivery leads were located in the UK. This worked extremely well.

Another project you and I worked on had delivery teams in UK and India and the client ‘in between’. This was a bit harder to get right, and not (only) because the clients were in a separate location.

Why Distributed Teams?

M: So let’s take a step back. In case of ‘my’ projects there were generally three reasons why we shape distributed teams:
Clients are looking for cost efficiencies that come with non EU locations, but still prefer close contact with our teams in their primary location.
Resourcing constraints in a single location and the need to ramp up quickly are a secondary reason.
Finally, we often find the idea of ‘extending working hours’ by going with the sun a driver for distributed team.

S: I agree, cost efficiency is the main driver here, we often find ourselves in a situation where clients want to benefit from advantageous local rates.

Benefits?

M: I’m wondering, what do you think the real benefits of Distributed Teams are.

S: I think it’s a big advantage. Ok, let me precede this by saying that the best way of working is without doubt co-located. Clients and dev teams in a single room, constantly collaborating. But we also need to appreciate that in today’s world, we will work with global clients as in our case where we actually have no office in the client location but only 1500 miles ‘East’ and 3500 miles ‘West’. So there we are, distributed teams are there to stay.

The number one benefit is increased productivity. While we need to be very careful with the concept of ‘following the sun’, if done right — i.e. if you structure your teams well — there can be major benefit. I don’t mean working all 24 hours, that can be detrimental if we extend actual working hours and mess up people’s work life balance, but some time-shifting allows to teams to have ‘time for themselves’ and time for collaboration. In our current project, because we are in India, we have a headstart, then 2 hour in the clients wake up, then 2 hours later you folks in the UK come into the mix. So we can accomplish and complete things before the other teams come in and so on… If that’s managed well, it’s magic.

M: You and I disagree a bit on how beneficial Distributed Teams are. I get the advantages of having access to a wider resource pool and lower rates (let’s not get into the ethics of different rates in this post). But I am not convinced that the problems do outweigh challenges. In fact, I have seen too many Distributed Teams perform at lower quality and productivity than co-located teams. I must say, though, that I am a big fan of culturally diverse teams and to me, this is a big advantage. Specifically this comes with effort…

What do we think are the challenges when working with distributed teams?

S: We are really talking about the 6Cs here: teamstruCture (<that was Marcel’s idea), Challenge, Culture, Communication, Collaboration and Consistency.

TeamstruCture: Finding the perfect balance of decoupling teams while maintaining highest levels of collaboration, which is all about proper division of responsibilities. If you get your team structure wrong, alignment and communication between teams becomes very difficult.

Another important challenge is to offer an equal split of interesting and challenging work across locations: too often do we treat offshore teams as second class citizens. What makes Equal Experts work so well is that offshore teams are empowered and self-managed, and have as much trust as any other teams.

Also, there is the culture thing. We must be mindful of behaviours and biases that come with social conditioning, how people have been raised and educated and also with the culture in individual offices. It’s very easy to second guess, to misunderstand, to project, and as we know it’s a downward spiral from there…

M: To follow on with the latter 3:

Communication is key in making distributed teams work, in the sense that ‘out of sight, out of mind’ means it is much easier for a team’s understanding to diverge. Also, sharing of information is harder via non face2face communication channels.

Collaboration that we may not sufficiently frequently communicate or not sufficiently JIT as distance and time-differences make this harder.

Finally there is consistency in regards of ways of working. If we have issues with communication and collaboration, often aggravated by too rapid upscaling, we won’t have consistent working practices, shared values, understanding what good looks like, or may even struggle for teams to understand the product or architectural vision.

So, here is the million dollar question, what we you think we need to do, to make Distributed Teams work?

S: Communication. Always. Mutual trust. You cannot delivery anything without trust.

And again, communication, communication, communication.

The less you see a person the more you need to communicate to be connected with them. I don’t think many people think that way.

Travel, meet in person. On our current project we periodically meet in the UK, India and in-between. Get to know the ‘other side’. Collaborate as much as possible. Overlap time zones (within reason) to facilitate collaboration. Especially initially. Ramp up slowly to allow for all this to happen. Once connections from both sides have been made, we can ease off a bit.

Let me back-pedal here a bit. I’m not sure travel is required (M: I think I do. Meeting face 2 face is invaluable). It’s not travel. Really, it is communication. On my previous project I managed to connect well with rapidly changing delivery leads in the UK virtually. But of course this takes deliberate effort.

M: Agreed. Well-working communication not only allows us to work together well, makes for happy teams, but also keeps us aligned in regards to what to achieve, a shared vision.

For me, the most important factor to allow all this to happen is to give the team time and headspace to shape and form, and be able to do the right thing and learn from their experiences.

So, what do you think, are Distributed Teams a good idea?

S+M: We have seen it can work. And in fact it must work. Globalisation is here to stay. And it’s fun. But you need to put the effort in, it’s not happening on its own.

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Published in The Digital Business Analyst

Thoughts, musings and ramblings of a digital consultant by Burn Up Media Ltd

Written by Marcel Britsch

London-based digital consultant, product owner and business analyst: www.beautifulabstraction.com. Marcel writes on behalf of www.burnupmedia.com.

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