Challenges Faced by Distributed Teams. Part 1
Introduction
As an introduction to this article, let’s first consider the title in detail. The word “challenges” doesn`t carry a negative connotation here, as a distributed team is a rule rather than an exception in the modern IT world. Taking into account globalization of IT business, staff shortage in traditional production areas, and development of outsourcing, distributed project teams have become a reality of almost any project. And Artezio is no exception, as its production departments are spread over 6 different locations from Saratov to Minsk.
In this article, I would like to describe a number of approaches to solving “challenges” in a particular project and team but they shouldn’t be considered as a cure-all for other company projects. However, some practices can be successfully applied to other projects as well. Besides, we have wide experience in introducing a number of practices that have already been adopted in Artezio and other software development companies.
What are the challenges?
The challenges facing distributed teams can be classified as follows:
- Communication problems. Unfortunately, despite the development of communication technologies, nothing can replace face-to-face communication. Having no possibility to come up to a colleague next to you and explain your thoughts is a downside of distributed development. These can also include risks of failures and quality deterioration of communication lines, different working hours and time zones between project groups, and communication costs.
- Infrastructure problems. Distributed teams often require complete replication of project infrastructure between production sites due to communication capacity limitations. Thus, costs for hardware and software licenses and their maintenance increase sharply. Another problem lies in a choice of the right software suite and its compatibility with the process of product development, monitoring, and project management. As a result, project configuration management becomes a nightmare for a project manager, and such simple things as consistent code building or version preparation become a serious challenge for the whole team.
- Methodological problems. It has been considered for many years that the main method to mitigate risks caused by a distributed project is formalization of the development process. However, agile methodologies are gaining greater popularity. Choosing between a heavyweight process, on the one hand, and SCRUM concepts, on the other, presents a real challenge for project managers (taking into account that SCRUM methodology doesn’t assume distributed development).
- Social and cultural differences. It may seem that this problem exists only in multicultural teams. However, even when the differences are minimal (for example, one team is in the capital, and the rest are in other towns of the same country) and all the teams speak the same language, it is still possible that some problems, conflicts, and misunderstandings arise between team members.
What has to be done?
The main challenges listed in the classification above are communication and infrastructure. Since the company operational personnel is spread over several locations, these challenges had to be solved within the whole company. Virtualization of the company IT infrastructure was chosen as the most suitable approach to handling infrastructure problems.
