Synchronizing the Right Work, at the Right Time, Regardless of Distance

The foundation of teamwork is a shared vision of the situation. From that, the team can create an action plan to move toward a common objective. When the team is dispersed across different campuses, cities, or countries, creating a shared vision and plans becomes even more difficult, so in most cases, it's poorly done or not done at all. This leads to people working on the wrong things, the right things in the wrong order, or the right things with the wrong information. These situations are called “synchronization errors”.

The most common synchronization errors arising from location confusion come down to two root causes:

• Time Phasing – delays in communications. When working across multiple time zones and schedules, critical information is often communicated at different times. In a distributed team environment, it’s difficult for people to get the answer when they need it, leading to blockages (waiting), quality problems (working with erroneous assumptions), and missed opportunities to accelerate progress.
• Batch Communications – not all information is shared with everyone. When teams come together once or twice a week (or even every day) on a conference call, communication is limited in scope and duration. The typical informal communication around lunch or in the coffee room, when teams are co-located, just does not happen with remote teams. Thus, the team loses a critical aspect of collaboration – information and insight.

Since time shifting and distance are difficult (until someone changes the need for sleep and invents the teleporter), you’ll have to focus on two dimensions of team communication: frequency and content.

Start with the content. We typically don’t have much time, so we want to give the team a quick overview of the project and its status so we can focus on moving forward. We like visual project boards to show project context, combined with purposeful stand-up meetings to keep us moving forward. With a distributed team, you’ll need two identical boards or one electronic board.

Anyone can put up a board that visualizes the project, but the key to creating value is how the board is designed and how you run your formal communications process. The stand-up meeting sets the stage and establishes a hierarchy for solving problems; it focuses the team on the future and orients them to action. Additionally, this reduces the need to meet at other times. Even if you need a high frequency of meetings per week, the duration is shorter and the content is more meaningful than in traditional project reviews.

The critical information for synchronization is:

• Which projects have the highest risk? The board shows the status of ALL work in the system, so the team can see the big picture and how each piece fits together.
• Which tasks are the most critical in those projects? The board shows the flow of each project or work stream to quickly identify which tasks are stuck.
• Who owns them? Each task has the name of the manager accountable for its completion.
• What action will accelerate completion? The resolution is assigned during the stand-up meeting.

This solution was implemented at one of our client’s sites. They were concerned they would fail to deliver a new product and identified a specific chipset design for a critical component as the main cause of the delay. The team responsible for the design was far from the assembly site and had fallen months behind without even knowing it. By using an electronic visual project management tool, the chipset team saw the project’s overall progress and their role in execution. The visual project system helped the team focus their efforts. Being alerted to the significance of their contribution and the delay in their progress, they reprioritized less critical work and assigned additional resources to their task, closing a four-month output gap in just one and a half months.

My eBook, Remote Control: How to Get Productive Teamwork from Distributed Project Teams, covers synchronizing distributed work in more depth.