| I had a small telecommuting team once, and what helped us a lot were two pieces of technology around which our development process was built. The first one was a simple issue tracker. The 'nudging' and 'motivating' bit became almost redundant. There always was a list of issues that needed to be addressed one by one, and the employees could work on the simplest ones, or on the complex ones, depending on their skill level and personal energy level at the time. The second piece was the idea of short 'sprints' we borrowed from the Scrum process. Each week we aimed to deliver something that worked, so there was a set of issues that needed to be addressed as a matter of a priority. In this way the team stayed motivated and saw results of their work, i.e. there was an (almost) instant gratification. Interestingly, one of my developers was a 'star', and another was a 'rookie', but they found a happy balance under this system. The experienced one tackled complex/architecture related issues and avoided the boring simple tasks which the less experienced employee was happy to do because that kept him feeling productive and contributing. The management process consisted of a weekly skype conference call where we would agree on a issue set for the next 'sprint', and then we simply communicated through email to check on the progress during the week and to address problems. Obviously, I had to write up the requirements (in the form of issue tickets) as well. Again, a simple issue tracker (we used Roundup) was the single most useful management tool for that project. |