Working with virtual teams.

Now a day’s virtual team concept is growing rapidly and many startups, sme’s are switching to this.
Virtual teams are group of people working across locations by communication model like Email, Telephone & instant messaging. Virtual teams may not have the same level hierarchy as in the organizations but the purpose behind this is only one to get the best out of the industry.

CHALLENGES:

Many of us think that working with distributed or virtual team may not be easy as team members are not always from the same organization.

1. Difficult to build trust.
2. Managing the conflicts is hard.
3. Understanding co-workers and their capabilities.
4. Decision making.
5. Working across time zones.

BENEFITS:

There are lots of benefits working with virtual teams for employees/freelancers as well as employer/project owners. For freelancers it’s easy to work from home or any other location which suits them across different time zones and can work on multiple projects from multiple project owners. For employers it is really benefited as they need not to invest more on infrastructure, lower operating cost and can extract the best from the market.

1. People can work from anywhere.
2. No cost like travel, parking.

COMMUNICATION TOOLS:

1. Skype: This tool plays a very important role for communication and a must have tool for all the start-ups, sme’s.
2. Zoho Projects:  With this tool team member can share timeline, documents view project status and this helps them to deliver projects on time.
3. Google Drive, Sky Drive or drop box can also be used for file storage that people can access from anywhere and on multiple devices like Laptop, Tablet, Mobile phones.

The more you plan on paper the better way you can code.

Planning is most important aspect of any Software development process and for doing so many of us uses either traditional Software engineering process or simply defined our own.

Planning is one of the Steps in many Architecture models that we follow, but in real world planning start from getting customer & their requirements.

Image courtesy i Stock

Many Start-ups and their software developer fails in the planning phase as they believe / work on the rapid development and delivering model. This is due to lack of time and always wanted to do more and deliver more. I had discussions with few developers working in Start-ups or SME's on the planning and answers is WE DO PLANning but in mind and yes on the header section of my notepad. 

Is this kind of planning we really need when we want to get our software or application done. NO.

Guys if we follow these below line items in our notepad for any application that we are working on will really help us to get job done in the time frame as well as deliver exact what is required by the client.

• Draw Project Plan Before initiating the code.
• Analyze all the modules and Phases of the application.
• What all the steps you need to work around in modules like:
• T-SQL
• Writing Functions
• Stored Procedures.
• No. Of screens.
• Fields and sections in the screen.
• coding
• etc...
• Analyze turn around time modules wise.

Now once you are ready with the project document anytime you start developing just go through the document and read what all the things you need to carried and this way you really save your lots of time.

may be i have missed many points but you can search more on Google and prepare your own working model and start developing.

A difference between an Entrepreneur and Business man.

When you’re doing things like others do, then you might not be an Entrepreneur... BUT when you start doing things differently then YES... you are an Entrepreneur.

How to get things done from your team member.

There is a huge difference between doing things on our own and getting things done from other, I came across few team leaders who are intelligent enough to develop the project and deliver it on time but due to one thing they miss their time lines and face the music from their bosses and that is ‘How to Manage team members and get things done in the time line.’

Below are few points which I think is very important when it comes to Team Managing:

• Understand your team members and their capabilities.
• Don’t’ underestimate any of your team members.
• Motivate your team member by means of appreciating their work or from other sources.
• Make them understand about the project criticality don’t make them pressurize for the deliveries and to-do’s.
• Help your team members to draw their own timeline, progress chart which help them as self motivating.
• Always listen to the suggestion and appreciate them no matter whether it is useful or not.
• Try to always feel them relax this helps in increasing the productivity.

There will be more points which we have to write by our own and by understanding our team members and this will definitely help to grow the team productivity and timely deliveries.

Requirement gathering.

Requirement gathering is the first and most important part any software development process and here many start-ups lacks.

Some of the points due to which many of us face difficulties in getting exact requirement from client.

•         Scope and Vision not clearly defined.
•          All requirements are critical, no priority is defined.
•          Signed-off requirements keep changing.
•          New requirements get added in the middle of the project.
•          Users/ Customers are busy and not available to specify requirements.
•          Functionality built, rarely or never used.

(And all these things HELP many of our boys not to deliver the project/product on time.)

There are some techniques which help resolves these problems and it is the way we both client and our team can be confident that requirements are understood and documented clearly.

Techniques are:

•          Apprenticing Technique
•          Brainstorming Technique
•          Mind Mapping
•          Use Case Workshops Technique
•          Interviewing Technique
•          Family Therapy Technique
•          Reusing Requirement Technique
•          Videos and Photographs
•          Prototyping

Code project help me learn more about requirement gathering just Google these techniques and learn more about these.

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