| From an enterprise standpoint, I was lead of a team with engineers both in Oregon and Hong Kong. What made us successful was a few key things. 1. We ended up with dedicated BAs and QAs on site in HK so the engineers could get their questions answered in real-time. Those colleagues collaborated with their counterparts in Oregon in the same way the engineers did. I think this was the biggest success factor. 2. We had a daily synch-up video conference at end of day Oregon time, which was beginning of day HK time. This face to face time was great even though most days it was only 5-10 minutes long. It made us feel more like a team and helped morale. 3. The engineers were all self starters (as others have mentioned) meaning they could operate under ambiguity or without direction as needed. 4. I, as lead, managed most of the merging of code (this was before our org used GIT, so we weren't really doing PRs as much as old style, manual code reads). 5. Occasionally, maybe twice a year or so, we'd fly out the HK teams to Oregon to join us for major events (important project meetings, etc...). During those occasions, we'd also hang out after work quite a bit, again to keep up the camaraderie. Those things worked pretty well for my team. |
I HATE conference calls but daily standup infront of a cisco screen between 2 teams is pretty good.