Effective communication - Distributed teams can absolutely be effective

I believe I am very good at system development and to make development a success. I aim therefore to fill this blog with my thoughts, best practices and experience that are related to System development.

A blog is very much about communication - and communication, I belive, is a necessity for success.

For long I thought it is not possible to work in distributed teams. I had a lot of experience of working with collegues split between countries, mainly split between Copenhagen in Denmark and Stockholm in Sweden.

Then I realised, the problem was not the distance. It was the communication!Everybody insisted that the communication should be in Scandinavian - even though no such language exist. Once we started to listen to our instincts and communicated the way we understood - english - work started to get smooth!

But the main thing with communication, I believe, is to communicate effective!

Since nobody questions the good of chat and mail - I would like to give a tribute to the phone! The phone, I would say, is the number one tool for effective communication! It is the phone that make us feel near. The human voice. We work with computers - but so far, we are still not computers. The human voice, when not screaming and scolding, make us feel allied. When we are allied, we start to work more effective. Because we dare to ask when we don't understand and we dare to double check when we are in doubt.

I call all. Managers, collegues, clients and sometimes very rare, even friends...The trick is to make short calls. Just a minute or two. But my oh my, how much faster and effective things go. Especially detecting misunderstandings and finding solutions.But keep the calls short. Better more and short. According to me.

To meet live or atleast on the phone - is a to z for building a relation.If I have a relation to my client, my client will not scold me when I've misunderstood or done wrong. Instead we will work together and do right.

Especially for distributed teams, it is a necessity not to feel any hinder in picking up a phone. In todays IT world where more and more teams are distributed between continents and the collegues we work with may have strange sounding name, different culture, climate and believes - we tend to be even more reluctant to pick up the phone. Nowadays, nobody can blame this reluctant behaviour to have to do with telephone costs, since no such hardly exist any more. We have to face it, we are afraid of the different. We like to hide behind a chat or mail.

But by just picking up the phone - phoning the partner, client, collegue in that distant location, we break that barrier. Once broken - communication start to flow!And this is according to me the true road for success. This is the true way of eliminating the "them" and "us".

And equally important, I believe, is to break down the hindrance to calling the client. We need to have a direct communication in order to check, double check and triple check that we are on the right track. No misunderstandings. And it is of our clients interests. And they like it. The've told me!

Thankfully, ofcourse there are a lot of process theories that helps and encourage us in communication and doing right. But with ineffective communication, you might as well go to bed!

Communicate effective.

Maybe that should be my new parol? No - I'll stick to my initial one...

"If you see someone without a smile, give him one of yours..."