Remote Team Management

I'm on my fourth month now, enjoying working from home. During this short period of time, I've encountered the ups and downs of managing a team of online workers. I want to share with you some insights I had gained.

• Open communication is a necessity. You can impose a rule that without reports on what has been accomplished, they won't get paid. Setting up a specific time that they should be online and available for you to reach them and vice versa is also essential.
• Having their work submitted on a repository like SVN or Sourcesafe so that you have the codes, can check if they are working to your standards and so on can also catch slackers early on.

Screening developers:

• Resume, portfolio, work experience, and interview would tell how efficient a developer is. One can also give an exam to test their skills in the technology that you want them to use. Of course, having first-hand knowledge on that technology is essential.
• Based on http://developers.sun.com/toolkits/articles/manage.html , under the "How Do You Measure Up", I think giving the developers a character / EQ exam would also determine if they are fit to work from home or work in an office setup

(And based on that article, I found out that I really fit in working from home type.)


Here are some links I found that are worth reading:

• This gives a good example / analysis on remote management -- http://www.telogis.com/managing-remote-workers/
• This discusses problems (and solutions) encountered in remote management --
  http://remote-employee-management.blogspot.com/
• General guidelines in remote management
• http://www.bnet.com/article/how-to-manage-employees-in-remote-locations/165147
• http://developers.sun.com/toolkits/articles/manage.html

This post / research was inspired by a task given by my boss where I work as a part-time personal assistant.