
Many timezones, one team – how do you stand up? - sarcas
http://engineering.freeagent.com/2016/01/06/many-timezones-one-team/
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MCRed
He tripped and fell into the solution-- and then didn't recognize it.

Everything conveyed in a standup is covered by your project tracker (what you
did, what you're working on, and where you're stuck) and discussion can happen
in your team chat.

Async development is the way to go. If you're having a standup, you're wasting
time. And it doesn't work if you're distributed.

The issue tracking really shows what the status si. IF you're stuck, you
assign the issue to someone to help you fix it, or you ask in the team chat
room.

Keeping abreast of what's going on in the chat room keeps you abreast of the
status of the team. The kanban board records it.

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rajuru
We used to work in +6 and -5 (or -4) timezone. Given no overlapping work
hours, it was pretty difficult to do it. So one person from either team
volunteered and proxy the team during odd hours standup (and we rotated each
week which side will join at odd hours). However, later we've converted to
collocated teams which is working greatly.

There is still someone (now specifically product owners) who bridges between
both sides but both team now feel better sense of ownership as they their
separate responsibilities in same product.

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_droptable_
While the question is interesting, unfortunately the article didn't really
present a good solution. At least I would have liked to see the results of
more than one approach rather than just the one presented (which isn't really
a solution IMHO).

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kissmd
we have teams in UK (-1), Hungary and China(+6), so basically the same setup.

We do standups in UK morning so EU members have a morning standup and China
members have a 'day closing' standup: "today i did..., tomorrow i will begin
with ...".

works like a charm.

~~~
sarcas
That sounds like a great solution, and isn't something we've tried yet. What's
the team spread like? Are you folk fairly cross-functional? As in do you have
members of the same team in each of the countries? And if you do, is the split
fairly even (2 from each for example)?

I might suggest we trial what you're doing on Monday.

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mikewhy
Not sure if it will fit your use case, but this was on HN a little while ago:

[https://www.standupmail.com/](https://www.standupmail.com/)

~~~
sarcas
Oh that's interesting. It looks like it would cover some of requirements (ie
by presenting everyone with a list of stand up notes). I wonder if you can
schedule when your 'day' starts with stand up mail on a team member by team
member basis, since that's one of the problems we were trying to solve. I'll
dig into it, thank you!

Since the events of the blog post we've been experimenting with some similar
steps, which have been working quite well. I hope to write them up soon.

