Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

13

DEC

Intercontinental Collaboration Challenge!

13 DEC 2010 | Posted in agile approach, collaboration | Author Stan Wade | 1 Comment

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Isn't it great the way agile techniques allow you to discuss issues with your team mates sitting next to you in the same war room. It's not so great when the war room spans several continents. It’s even harder when your team members speak several different mother tongues and they are still trying to get a basic grasp of agile concepts let alone project details.

It's not a new problem, but it’s still not got a good solution in my opinion. Agile techniques are often very visual and telephone conferencing simply isn’t up to the challenge. Compounded by strong accents and the limited quality of even the most expensive telephony equipment the problem is significant.

The most obvious answer isn’t always applicable. Even though the productivity benefits can justify the additional cost, we can’t ship teams over to the UK simply because we don’t have the space. Getting additional space may be a great idea for a small company, but when you are already taking half a city centre; getting the other half isn’t quite that easy.

So I have been looking to video technology to try and improve the situation. We have great video conferencing suits (including one so cool that you feel you are in a James Bond film, about to deliver a demand to the US president for $100Bn or California gets it!), but you need services at both ends and that’s a problem. We need something simple and easy to access. I have tried a number of products which looked promising such as Google Wave which looked great till it got pulled earlier this year. I have also tried a number of commercial offerings, some of which are Ok, but what I was after was something really mainstream that everyone could use such as Skype, but that is only peer to peer. No it isn’t!

Skype Group video calling is now in beta and allows up to 10 or so concurrent video connections.  You need Skype 5, and it’s free for now.

I am going to play with this and see if it’s any good.

What are other people using? What tools do you use to bridge the continental divide?