In my previous job, I traveled heavily. I was often called upon to meet with clients in their offices, attend conferences, and conduct grants and public art panels. I traveled many 100's of the thousands of miles in airplanes and turned many hotel rooms into temporary office spaces.
For the last 20 months or so, in my current job with pingVision, my travel has been very light. It has been, in fact, limited to pleasure and a few conferences. This has meant my collaborative work on different Drupal projects has been largely face to face with development staff. This has been a very different experience than at WESTAF where all development was outsourced, largely to a company called Brownrice Internet in Taos NM. This meant that planning, architecture, wireframing, and comps were developed in-house but all programming was then sent out creating--for all intents and purposes--a virtual environment. Add to that my travel, and I found myself often physically isolated from company staff and the development team. This was mitigated through the use of:
- Skype
- IRC
- iChat
- email
- land line
- mobile
- SMS
Until I began work at pingVision, I didn't really realise how much more efficient one can be when your lead developer or themer is right around the corner. Being able to gather a group of extraordinarily intelligent coders into a single space to hash out issues in a project started out as a pleasure but I've been enlightened to see it as a necessity.
In our bricks and mortar company, we use the same tools listed above heavily. But they have become an adjunct to face to face meetings that take place in both planned and unplanned times. Ad-hoc gatherings have become a norm to rapidly work out issues.
So, while I sat on an airplane on the way to Alabama this past week to meet with clients with another likely trip in the near future to New York I found myself starting to dust off the old methods of getting things done.
- Ensuring that I have all necessary files to do my job stored locally on my hard drive.
- Making sure that client phone numbers on my iPhone are up to date.
- Checking email immediately before take off on a flight.
- Calling into the office to make sure no fires are burning.
- Using SMS to have brief connects with key players in the projects I'm helping manage.
They still fit like an old comfortable pair of jeans. The routines quickly come into play once again. I even found myself listening to music that have been my flight stand-bys.
In Drupal development, that means abandoning shared databases for our the projects I'm working on--until I'm back at my desk in Boulder. If I'm needed to look at database changes (like a View that has been tweaked or created) that have been made to a project prior to client review, they will either need to be staged on a server behind htaccess or I'll need to make the changes myself on a local copy on my laptop. SVN makes code changes much less problematic.
Travel can be a business requirement. That said, nothing beats working from an office with your colleagues. Communication is clearer, technical issues are less onerous, and problem solving is easier.
What are your procedures for working virtually? How do they different from working with your co-workers face to face?