As an aside - there is a large amount of research showing co-located
teams be far more effective than distributed ones...
There was a workshop at CWCW 2008 looking at some of this stuff last
year if folk are interested. Don't know if the results are written up
anywhere.
http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dhncd3jd_343cmcr7mcm
I'll pick one paragraph from the workshop description:
"It doesn't take much distance before a team feels the negative
effects of distribution - the effectiveness of collaboration degrades
rapidly with physical distance. People located closer in a building
are more likely to collaborate (Kraut, Egido & Galegher 1990). Even at
short distances, 3 feet vs. 20 feet, there is an effect (Sensenig &
Reed 1972). A distance of 100 feet may be no better than several miles
(Allen 1977). A field study of radically collocated software
development teams, i.e. where the teammates share a large open-plan
room, showed significantly higher productivity and satisfaction than
industry benchmarks and past projects within the firm (Teasley et al.,
2002). Another field study compared interruptions in paired, radically-
collocated and traditional, cube-dwelling software development teams,
and found that in the former interruptions were greater in number but
shorter in duration and more on-task (Chong and Siino 2006). Close
proximity improves productivity in all cases."
... and some more refs from other places ...
<http://possibility.com/Misc/p339-teasley.pdf>
"Teams in these warrooms showed a doubling of productivity."
<http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TSE.2003.1205177>
"One key finding is that distributed work items appear to take about
two and one-half times as long to complete as similar items where all
the work is colocated"
<http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kraut/RKraut.site.files/articles/Espinosa07-TeamKnowledge&Coordination.pdf
>
"Our findings reveal that: software developers have different types of
coordination needs; coordination across sites is more challenging than
within a site; team knowledge helps members coordinate, but more so
when they are separated by geographic distance; and the effect of
different types of team knowledge on coordination effectiveness
differs between co-located and geographically dispersed collaborators."
<http://tinyurl.com/yqs5dp>
"Our results show that, compared to same-site work, cross-site work
takes much longer and requires more people for work of equal size and
complexity. We also report a strong relationship between delay in
cross-site work and the degree to which remote colleagues are
perceived to help out when workloads are heavy"
<http://www.springerlink.com/content/0137yud7c3k8xryw/>
"Findings reveal that aspects such as a lack of a common understanding
of requirements, together with a reduced awareness of a working local
context, a trust level and an ability to share work artefacts
significantly challenge the effective collaboration of remote
stakeholders in negotiating a set of requirements that satisfies
geographically distributed customers"
Cheers,
Adrian
--
delicious.com/adrianh - twitter.com/adrianh - [email protected]
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