Remote team

BNET has a great article on managing employees in remote locations that includes tips for building trust. Trust is key to the effective functioning of any team, whether distributed geographically or not. Fortunately, you don’t have to meet face to face to create and maintain trust with remote colleagues, especially with so many communications tools available online. Here are BNET’s tips for building trust on virtual teams, with my web worker additions below. BNET: Be available. Don’t let employee calls go to voicemail. When you absolutely can’t be reached, reply ASAP. The web way: Use ***

Although not all web workers prefer to work outside of corporate offices, a lot of us do. So finding companies that are amenable to the idea of telecommuting is always a boon. Those organizations often have leadership that is comfortable with the idea of managing people who are “out of sight.” One such firm is SunGard Higher Education, based in Malvern, Pennsylvania, which provides software, consulting and outsourcing services to 1,600 universities and colleges worldwide. According to senior VP Jeff Cottle, the company has 2,800 employees, of which 700 are “assigned as remote and do not have an office location.” Many of the others telecommute on a flex schedule, he said. “We don’t have a formal policy about who can and who can’t telecommute. Our managers make the decision of whether an individual can telecommute. ***

IBM is working on an open-source project called Jazz to promote programming tools for globally distributed teams. Set to launch in June at Jazz.net, the project will be based on work from IBM Research and its Rational tools division around geographically distributed collaborative software development. The primary goal of the project is to establish standards around distributed software development, which is becoming the norm, said Danny Sabbah, general manager of IBM Rational. Historically, development tools have focused primarily on making individual programmers more productive. But as software development becomes more complex, IBM, Microsoft and others have focused on making products that address the full development lifecycle, from gathering application requirements to testing. ***

From amid the rubble in lower Manhattan on Wednesday, CNN reporter Gary Tuchman used a videophone to relay exclusive interviews of emergency staffers searching for survivors of the previous day's carnage. And only hours after the collapse of the World Trade Center on Tuesday, CNN also used a videophone to transmit an interview with the Taliban's leaders in Afghanistan as they sought to allay suspicions that Saudi exile Osama bin Laden was involved in the unprecedented terrorist attacks. These were just two marks of a crisis brought viscerally close to home, boosted by the media's use of satellite communications technology that continues to stretch and speed reporters' reach. ***

Software giant Microsoft and telecommunications firm Cable & Wireless today announced an alliance with Compaq Computer to tackle application hosting for small and medium-sized businesses. United Kingdom-based Cable & Wireless, which previously struck a $500 million deal with Compaq to develop data centers, said it will remotely host, manage, install and support Microsoft products, along with additional business applications, using server, storage and PC hardware from Compaq. The first service offered by the triumvirate will feature the Microsoft Windows 2000 operating system, Microsoft Office 2000 productivity software and Microsoft Exchange messaging tools. The service will be remotely hosted from Cable & Wireless data centers and will initially be available to businesses in the United States and the United Kingdom by July. ***