Category: Computing

Lessons for managing teams working at home

I’m usually an early riser, a habit that started when I was growing up on a farm where the day’s work started when the cows woke up. In early fall, I’m awake when the crests of the foothills begin to show as a faint silhouette on the horizon. One morning this week, looking out on the same jagged line between dark and light in the eastern sky that I have seen thousands of times and hope to see a thousand times more, I realized that habits I learned in the old farmhouse inspired the remote agile scrum I used to manage remote software development teams working from dispersed offices and homes.

Sixty years ago, working from home was common. My uncle Arn and several of the neighbors on Waschke Road worked out, which meant they had jobs off the farm, not that they exercised their muscles regularly. Avoiding exertion was more in vogue then.

Most ran their own farms, more or less independently. Farm cash came mainly from dairying. Milk checks were small in those days, very small if your bacteria counts were high and you were forced to ship milk to the ice cream, cheese, and powdered milk factories instead of the Seattle Grade A fresh milk market. Many of the jobs on the farm, like harvesting hay, thrashing grain, and filling silos were too big for a single family to handle by themselves and there was no money for hiring help. The answer was to work together.

Working together

You don’t see folks working together much now the way the used to. Today, folks who want to accomplish something big and complex hire a contractor. The contractor has an organization and a network of suppliers and subcontractors. Strike an agreement and the contractor gets the work done.

Even when someone acts as their own contractor, the process is based on money moving from person to person. If you don’t have ready money but you want the job done immediately, no problem. There’s an entire financial industry– banks, mortgage companies, credit cards, payday loans, and pawn shops– eager to supply you with whatever money you need. If that fails, there is always GoFundMe. But at the time and in the place where I grew up, those resources were rare and money was hard to come by.

No Gantt charts, critical paths, or milestones

In those days, work was often done without money. Hands showed up on the day they were needed. No Gantt charts, critical path analysis, or milestones, not even a crude schedule on the back of an envelope. Maybe a phone call or two, but mostly the word got around and the hands appeared. The crew knew exactly what to do. No boss ever ordered anyone around. I never saw a To Do List on the farm and yet all the work was finished. Never a word about job descriptions, pay grades, or equal pay for equal work. Then, it seemed effortless. Now, it seems more like magic or a miracle.

When I think back on what working together was like, I realize that it was a subtle and delicate process that took a demanding level of skill to execute. Human nature is, in my observation, constant. Offer too much, and you are taken advantage of, offer not enough and you freeze in isolation. The variables are subtle and elusive. What is egregious flattery today is mild social lubrication tomorrow. My parents knew their work group with greater precision than I knew the software development team I led.

Farm management and visiting

My parents always shipped Grade A milk, but money was still tight. For them, maintaining social ties among their work group was a way of life. Nearly every afternoon and many evenings after milking, a neighbor or relative stopped at our house or mom and dad visited someone at their house.

I used to think sharing a cup of coffee was recreation. My parents enjoyed visiting; sitting down for “coffee-and” was a few minutes of rest in a long and strenuous day that started at sunrise and ended long after sunset, but I realize now that they had no choice: the circuit of visits, cups of coffee, and plates of cookies and sandwiches were the essential cooperative fabric of farm life. Cooperative work was designed and planned in those sessions, sometimes in wordless agreement, only occasionally with explicit dates, times, and assignments.

Mutual obligation

The neighbors worked from home on their own farms, paid their own bills, and nursed their own wounds, but to cut, rake, bale, and load hay into the mows; bind and thrash grain; and fill silos with chopped grass and corn, they had to work together. Without their neighbors, very small farmers and pensioners like John Schaefer, Luther Johnson, Howard Fretz, and Art Coss as allies, my parents could not keep the farm running. My parents helped them and they helped my parents. They formed an alliance, a team, that could be counted on for the big jobs. I saw no accounting of quid pro quo, no balancing of the books, only a simple recognition of mutual obligation.

While managing software development, I used mutual obligation without explicit quid pro quo to keep remote teams working together, although I did not know where I learned the technique, certainly not from the books of self help and management strategies I read. But the remote agile scrum I used to run were based on mutual obligation.

The daily standup

I always insisted on a daily “stand up.” Although I seldom enforced the rule, a daily stand up meeting is a meeting in which no one is allowed to sit down, because when no one gets comfortable, meetings automatically stay short. In the agile programming paradigm, these meetings are intended to answer several specific questions: what is everyone doing today, what is blocking progress, and what help do you need? The questions do not have to be answered in the standup. It’s often more efficient to deal with them in smaller side conversations.

That’s how it works in theory. Practice is somewhat different. Dissembling, I won’t call it lying, is endemic to standups. Everyone says they are bounding forward and wildly successful; no one ever freely admits they are stymied. Management-speak encourages dissembling: the word “problem” must always be replaced with “challenge.” Hah. Progress comes in small steps littered with mistakes that no one wants or needs to hear about.

Mutual obligations on software teams

So why insist on daily standups? Because remote teams have to work together, just like the small farmers when I was a kid, and they can’t work together if they don’t understand each other and their work. Communication and cooperation may look spontaneous, but they seldom occur without cultivation. My parents visited, I ran standup meetings to ensure that every member of the work group understood the role they and their neighbors played in the web of mutual obligation that makes up a team.

Little of that communication occurred in standup meetings themselves; most happened in the side conversations that the daily standup started and continued through the day and night. Since software teams are often globally distributed and the workweek varies from place to place, any hour of my day or night could be in the middle of some member of the team’s workday. Consequently, the work of the team never stopped. Someone was moving the project ahead every hour of every day.

I considered a big part of my job was to make sure the team members kept talking after the daily standup ended. In those days, I had administrative assistants. One of their tasks was to keep a contact sheet up to date and distributed to every member of the extended team. My assistants knew I liked to see new contact sheets distributed within minutes of changes in phone extensions, chat room parameters, anything that was necessary for team members to keep in touch. Those contact sheets were as essential as my parents’ knowledge of who was farming in the sections surrounding the farm.

I kept a mental list of conversations that I would verify were taking place, dropping in on discussions, making phone calls, and trying not to be a pest while urging the team on.

The daily standup was the hub and mutual connections were the rim of the wheel

As I am ending this post, the sun is not yet up. No horizon is showing; soft white fog blankets the farm. The fence our son hired a contractor to put up last month is only fifty yards away and invisible in the mist, yet I am confident that the fields are still there. Some days are like this both on the farm and in software projects. You’re sure everything is okay, but you can’t see what’s ahead. A good day for visiting and reinforcing the ties that make the wheel of progress roll.