work

We have a lot of remote meetings as most of our team work a significant amount of time from home. Face to face meetings are much better for some types of meetings - especially workshops and retrospectives. As the level of expected collaboration increases the more it favours face to face interactions.

On most projects there is a tendency for someone involved to become the "expert" in one or more areas. As they become comfortable and more knowledgeable in an area they will naturally gravitate to picking up tasks related to it. The need to deliver as quickly as possible can also drive this as the person who knows most is likely to be the person who can do the work quickest.

When someone leaves a company there are two sides to it.

We have just completed a two week exercise with the whole development team to identify, design and estimate the next phase of work. It started as an organic process as we found the best way to do this and then developed into a repeatable process for the latter functionality.

We had a meeting recently with 16 people on the video conference call. Due to poor planning and technical issues it took nearly half an hour to decide to postpone the meeting. That is eight man hours wasted - a whole day of work!