Introduction to remote collaboration tutorials

Phew! It's been a week since the KWLUG meeting where I talked about remote collaboration.

Believe or not, I hadn't had a moment, until now, to make good on my promise to post the tutorials on-line.

First I was on Project Management training in Toronto from Monday to Wednesday, then, Thursday and Friday preparing for an implementation at work that kept me at home in front of the computer all Saturday and Sunday.

How is this relevant to the collaboration topic? Well, For this implementation we had people at several locations in Halifax, Toronto, KW and Argentina. Most people working from home. Most of the work done remotely on the servers.

To coordinate the work, I recommended the main project manager to share the task by task schedule through an webconference while we were on a phone conference. We had some hiccups that required modifying the schedule on the fly. Everybody was able to see the changes and agree with them with little discussion and even less confusion.

While I was on a 2 hour break during a long running task I received a call from a different team doing a different, unrelated release. To understand the problem I opened another webconference to allow the developer share her desktop and explain it visually. Once I saw the problem I was able to provide a solution in a couple of minutes. Trying to explain the problem over email or even on the phone would have taken substantially longer.

Ultimately, even though I was working all weekend, I was able to do it in my pajamas in the warmth of my home and I didn't miss a beat.

The rest of the week I will post one topic per day, including a bit more detailed instructions that I didn't have time to present.

I hope you enjoy and contribute with even better ways to do what I'm doing.