To keep up engagement, motivation and morale, team has to achieve a series of micro-successes as the road to bigger success.

Scrum has it all covered: user stories are resolved one by one, one starts after previous is finished. In other agile variations, the entire team would even work on a same story at any given time.

The result is: team motivated, united and thus committed. Combined with Pavel’s pre-conditions, it brings outstanding achivements.

Mistakes are a part of being human. I do appreciate mistakes made by developers as long as their source is not the negligence due to absence of the basic responsibility. However, at the same time punishments can not be the proper tool in modern trust-based relations in distant management. As they would be accepted as blind actions.

Instead, taking in account that we’ll prefer to care about developers and do not fire them, there is an obvious need to make a step away from pure scrum. To motivate them more and came closer to idea of ’self-contained developers’ we have to pass a portion of the responsibility to them. It’s quite common that in distant development, we usually have isolated modules in the project, and developers are not interchangeable. In the case of team lead absence, it would be just a tiny formal step to pass responsibility in time and functionality of those modules to the corresponding developers.

In real-life, people need to see the results. It’s like as if you are gone fishing, but actually not motivated by the real fish…

My point is that intrinsic interest is more valuable, than one stimulated by the feedback. You can be just naturally interested about certain domain areas (e.g. somebody gets excited about certain solutions for financial market, and can’t care less about gambling sites and vice versa).

Sometimes I come to check some projects/sites I worked on to see, how they developed since last time. And sometimes I even check the projects which I wasn’t even excited about, the projects I was sure that the approach was wrong, but still had to work on the project the way customer asked, so I come just to check if I was wrong being skeptical.

I think the problem with “remembering” is, that the outsourcing model is “develop and forget” more often than not: it is expected to get something right with the first shot, on a fixed time and budget and that’s it. Usually, there’s no culture of long-term engagement, culture of “reworking” things, so people can’t just get attached to multiple projects that come and go.

Care about the project is key. If there is no feedback from the users/customers on after-launch, developers naturally stop caring. This is what kills the culture of outsourcing houses as they grow bigger.

Well, we are here to fight it, among other things. So, literally, the “so people will remember” part is Itteco’s senior management responsibility when “people” refers to “developers”, not “end-users” in this sentence. Once this is consistently being achieved, it is developers’ responsibility to take care of “end-users & customers will remember” piece.

Very true with regard to technology. But what we should learn is that people actually started using emails in Twitter-like manner (me – no exception). It means:
* actionable subject lines
* short messages
* perhaps, no Hi, Dear, etc.

I am mostly using emails for tracking actions and to-dos which are either small enough to get into a tracking system, or are urgent enough to make ensure that attention is given to it. Not immediate attention though – if immediate action is required, I would use IM or phone follow up.

For this, if you can:
* put the bigger content into wiki or tracking system. If it’s urgent or important not to forget – send me the link with short follow up
* put a clear subject line – so that when I star the email, I know what I wanted to do about it next time I visit it.
* Be careful with Reply action – change the subject line or start a new thread as the subject changes.

From my experience dealing with huge amount of emails I can say one thing – don’t sit in your email client for 24/7. Get some rules for yourself – check email 3 times a day, or two – believe me, it will make your day much more productive and will allow you to focus on what’s important. Make sure people know when you are checking emails, so they will be aware of the reply time period. If something urgent comes up – there is always IM or phone, so no need to panic that you are going to miss an urgent email. Email meant to be asynchronous – and it works best this way.

When checking email, I follow the pattern of PIFEM (which is actually based on 4 D’s of email management: do, delete, delegate, defer). It’s specifically designed for Outlook, however, can be implemented in any sufficient email client (http://blogs.msdn.com/ianpal/archive/2008/06/03/email-task-and-time-management-with-pifem.aspx#).

Furthermore, Inbox 0 has been my most valuable achievement in the last two years. You really can feel the tension go away when you have 0 emails in your inbox.

Don’t forget the EOM (you can read more here http://lifehacker.com/5028808/how-eom-makes-your-email-more-efficient)

If you think email will take more than 10 minutes to compose, why not call the people involved or discuss it in person – it will save you much of time and stop threads of further emails. Try to keep emails to one paragraph. Great ideas I’ve used for a while now – http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/mastering-the-short-email.html.