Jason Gorman has saved me a lot of time by writing an excellent summary of last Friday’s miniSPA including descriptions of the sessions I didn’t take part in - namely Mike Taulty’s C# session and the post-miniSPA pub trip. I’ve posted some notes on miniSPA’s Distributed Workforces session for those who’d like more detail on that particular session.

Jason has also included some nice pictures of the event that shows that yes, we were in fact working (for most of) that day. However, I would like to note that I would never stoop to working on Footballer’s Wives - unless the software industry gets really bad.

Last Friday’s miniSPA included a session on Distributed Workforces. This used the goldfish bowl format with a facilitator (Bernard Horan) and five press-ganged participants (David Harvey, Eoin Woods, Andy Moorley, Chris Cooper-Bland and Rob Machin) starting the discussion. A spare chair was available and this was occupied by various other participants throughout the session. My legible notes included:

• Most of the participants had learned their craft by working closely with more experienced people around them. What are the implications of a distributed workforce for new starters?
• Can a distributed workforce create the same sort of beneficial social environment as is found in a non-distributed arrangement? Can team members bond in the same way?
• Can we learn anything from other distributed workforces? e.g. community nursing, sales forces, open-source. Since software is a design activity should we look at other design activities for inspiration - no one could think of an example of distributed design.
• What are the prerequisites for distributing your workforce?
• How much experience should the team have? Does a distributed workforce have to consist of experts?
• Should they know each other
• Communication is key - but technology isn’t sufficient, get people to meet initially and regularly. Outsourcers take note.
• Your organisation shouldn’t have the attitude that people have to be at their desk in the office to be working
• Increasing cost of travel, and reluctance to travel, combined with decreasing communication costs will lead to more workforce distribution.
• Co-locating your team will always be more productive.
• Management of distributed workforces is hard.

 Bernard will place a sound recording of the session on the SPA Wiki in due course.