Collaborators in Europe, dev teams in India, key customers in Asia. Many of our US-based clients work with people 5, 7, or even 12 time zones away.
I’ve talked with Product Owners who are up at 5am for daily stand-ups with offshore devs and still have a full calendar of US meetings until 5pm.
This is exhausting for the people involved. And it also makes it very hard to address complex problems.
Complex problems—like creating new software capabilities for humans—have emergence. Doing the work teaches us what the work is. New data about the problem and the solution emerges as we begin creating the solution.
Making sense of that emerging data usually requires collaboration between multiple people. And if those people are spread across time zones, that collaboration is necessarily going to be delayed. What would have been a 15 minute conversation if everyone were working in the same office or even interacting live over Zoom or Slack becomes 2 days of back-and-forth.
Even then, there are often more multi-day loops as it becomes clear everyone wasn’t as aligned as it seemed.
At best, this means delays for a project. More often, it’s delays plus burnout as people work long days to try to work around the time zone gaps and shorten the feedback loops. As delays add up and everyone is running on fumes, you have less time to deal with emerging issues and even less mental capacity to handle them well. Delivering a successful result requires heroics or doesn’t happen at all.
Our CAPED (Complexity-Aware Planning, Estimation, & Delivery) approach can mitigate the pain of doing complex work with distributed teams.
It doesn’t make the complexity go away. But by identifying and probing the core complexity right from the beginning, CAPED front-loads those feedback loops and the intense collaboration for the time when energy and engagement is highest at the start of an initiative.
Then, as the complexity gets resolved, work moves into the complicated domain, and it’s much easier to coordinate across time zones. Projects move into a sustainable steady state without all those long email threads and early or late Teams meetings.
Are you tackling a high-stakes initiative with a distributed team? Join us for a free webinar later this month to learn how CAPED can help you.
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