 Okay, well good morning everyone. Welcome to the first session of Drupal Con in Austin. I'm very excited to be here and presenting this morning. My name's Anne Stefanik and I've been working in Drupal for the last about six and a half, seven years. My first few years in Drupal was actually at a marketing agency where I ran Drupal 5 sites as we were coming out of Flash. Drupal seemed like a whole new world of awesome to me at the time, even though it was very painful back in Drupal 5. Today I'm here to speak to you folks about running a distributed shop. A little bit about myself, as I mentioned, before I worked in Drupal I was working in the marketing scene and I actually worked remote. My head office was on the east coast and I was on the west coast. I worked from home and I had reps and coordinators all across western Canada. And when I started working in tech it was kind of an accident and I did fall in love with Drupal and all of its goodness. And throughout my career I've worked at many different shops. And just recently in last June I decided to strike out on my own. I never thought I would ever actually run my own shop because I never wanted the responsibility or the overhead. But as it turned out it was more of a lifestyle choice because I realized someone as you get more seasoned in your career you ultimately have more choice. And to me freedom is a big thing. So I chose to start my own shop not because I wanted to create a big agency but because I recognized there was a trend in all of the top talent. All of my friends no longer having jobs and we were all working as siloed entrepreneurs. So as I started Canopy Studios the intention really was to create a culture of freedom. And to create a space where a bunch of contractors could come together and work collaboratively on good projects. So I'm going to speak today a little bit about how to run a distributed shop, what makes a good distributed employee and just some overall key points. We'll do some Q&A at the end to keep the flow going but if you do have questions or anything that comes up that's just burning do let me know we have a mic at the front there. So first off I think the number one reason is why. We all get up in the morning we all go to work for some reason shape, form or another whether that's to feed our family whether that's to work on an amazing project. Personally for me it's to build tree houses. I bought land in my early 20s in Costa Rica. I grew up in Costa Rica and I've worked really hard to try to get there and no job seemed to give me enough freedom, flexibility or cash flow to go and build tree houses. If you want to look us up where Finka Bay Avista or you can just Google Treehouse Community Costa Rica it's a pretty rad project. And they do have full Wi-Fi so the dream is to actually work and live in the jungle like a kid, super fun. So a big thing about going distributed is a lot of people they have this wine I think this is a burning thing that we all need to look at. So we're looking at what is a distributed agency or a virtual team is a delocalized group of people that work together. A lot of my team is actually in San Francisco but we don't have an office and we've consciously chosen to work together in a distributed manner to give ourselves the lifestyle flexibility we all crave. Some of my team only works 20 hours a week. Some of them love to work and want to work 60 hours a week because they want the higher cash flow so they can go and do other things with their lives. Another thing to note is that the way that the economy used to work was very different. So before we had a very organizational type of structure and now with the emergence of the internet and the different types of communication tools available there is a lot of different reasons why people are going distributed. So if we're looking at the main motivations as to why people are starting to branch out on their own. Distributed models can go from the three to five person team, the one person team all the way up to very large organizations that have thousands of people that work from home or work from remote locations. A very obvious reason is obviously lower overhead. No office, less equipment, supplies, materials. There are some hidden costs as you get a little bit larger and needing to spend money on different things like retreats and collaborative type of tools and environments but generally you're finding your costs are lower. And for a small entrepreneur like I am it's really easy to be able to start something and create a lot of goodness without a lot of upfront cash. Another thing is a very rich talent pool. For those that already work in a small community you may have been forced to do this or if you work in Drupal you may have been forced to find talent that isn't necessarily in your hometown. Another thing with talent is that when you have a great rock star and their wife all of a sudden gets accepted to med school in different states having a distributed model allows you to retain that top talent. There's also talent in really small towns that are there because they're there because of family reasons or whatever obligations they have. So by having kind of a distributed model where people can connect in and work from home you all of a sudden have a greater access to talent. And as I just mentioned scalability is a big thing. There's nothing as magical as when I can get a project in and I can reach out to my network and say hey I've got 2,000 hours worth of work how do we want to do this. So I'm able to scale up on very large projects and also stay small on the smaller projects just by simply having this type of business model. In the end I'm happier. My team is happier. We all get to work on our own computers and our own workspace. I'm not a very good employee. I've realized that my functioning hours are highest between 6 and 8 a.m. again from 10 till 1 p.m. But I do absolutely nothing from 2 till 4. I have no brain power. This is not a good time for me to be sitting in a desk. So creating a distributed model allows me to have the lifestyle flexibility that I need to be able to be happy and ultimately more productive. Okay. So as I was mentioning before the economy's changed in terms of how we look at our workforce and there's a really great book out there by Daniel Pink called The Free Agent Nation. And it really summarizes nicely the aspects as to why this world is starting to become a more distributed environment. First off there's a huge trend for people working from home. Right now in America alone there's 34 million people working from home. And just in America the stat is from the Harvard Business Review I believe is that that's going to raise to 43%. That's a huge jump. And if you're not able to accommodate or you're not already working with a remote team it's going to be a very real thing that you'll have to look into and accommodate. Another thing that's really interesting is back a long time ago we were our parents were very loyal to the organization. They wanted a pension, healthcare, safety, security. Nowadays those things are the past. No longer are we so tied and married to our organization but we are tied and married to our colleagues and our network. So it's now more important than ever that you get out there and you meet everybody that you can know. Thanks to the community of Drupal I've been able to work with some really amazing top talent and been able to start a small boutique agency. And it wouldn't be without my network that I would have been able to do this. Another thing that's really interesting is that when you have a rise of this type of employee or remote worker as you know I can't do nine to five. It absolutely crushes my soul and I am not a happy person. And you'll probably feel this too. I mean I think you can probably look and ask yourself where do you get your best work done? And I can say very few of you are going to say in the office. Most are going to say I go to work early, I stay late, I work from home when I've got a really big deadline. You know more and more we're finding that the pressures of all of these different types of information sources were actually more productive when we work from home. So who is this person? There are probably many of you are already in the room and you don't necessarily need to be an entrepreneur but it definitely takes an entrepreneurial spirit. You really need to be a driven self-starter, super awesome at communication and you know really dependable. So that when you say you're going to be online at 9 a.m. you're going to be online at 9 a.m. Or if you say you're going to deliver something on Friday and for whatever reason you can't you're letting that person know on Thursday that that's not going to happen or sooner. It's really you know being a free agent takes a lot of discipline. It takes a lot of organization. And it takes a lot of passion because you have to love what you do every morning to get up and do it you know with at home without having all these other distractions around. So I want to show you a quick video. I'm going to see if this will work. This is really resonates. There's an ODesk has a, they call it a digital nomad which is pretty much the same thing. Let's see if I can do this. My commute to work was an hour and a half out of my day I would spend in my car. I used to have to fly literally a million miles a year. You add that up. That's a lot of wasted time. My commute to work was actually quite laborious. I was living in London. I would have to walk to catch the tube and then I'd be squished on the tube like every single other person stuck in the room. Do we have a tech person in the room? Yeah. How do I get sound from my computer? Thank you very much. So just while we're setting this up, how many people here currently work from home? How many people work with a completely distributed team? And a mixed team where half of you work from home, half of you work? How many people still work in the office full time? Do you want to work from home more? Yeah. It's a really interesting change that's happened here. And again, I can't be more grateful for the amount of people that are motivated to work from home. Let's see here. Yes, please. You have to actually click. Oh, there we go. Okay. Wonderful. Okay. Thank you guys. My commute to work was an hour and a half out of my day I would spend in my car. I used to have to fly literally a million miles a year. You add that up. That's a lot of wasted time. My commute to work was actually quite laborious. I was living in London. I would have to walk to catch the tube and then I'd be squished on the tube like every single other person stuck in the rat race. And then I had to repeat it all on the way home always in rush hour. It's exciting. Every day is a new adventure. Ten years ago I never thought I'd be able to do this but I can actually, we can be in the middle of the Arctic Circle in Greenland and doing our job. I would consider myself a digital limit. Somebody who has the freedom to work anywhere in the world where we want, when we want based on digital tools. People need access to a computer and the internet to have an office and not so much to real estate. It's no longer about nine to five, it's about results. The more freedom my team had, the more work they got done. I do believe that you can build your work and your business around your lifestyle. I basically live out of my suitcase, travel the world and run my online business with the help of a virtual team around the world. I've been championing the world for over ten years straight and everything I own comes with me. The Eco-Romer is a huge hunk and truck that we live in the back of and it's also the global headquarters of my company at Finlucky's. I left my traditional job when I had my son. Instead of going back I wrote my goals and decided what my work-life balance would look like and what was best for me and my family and that's how I came up with being a digital nomad and being able to work for myself. It gives me the opportunity to work when I like to work and I can go surfing when I like to surf. And it shouldn't be that only the most innovative companies embrace this model. I think that ten years from now it absolutely will be the norm. There are so many reasons why this is a great way to work. In my world means buying experiences, not stuff and that makes you feel rich in ways that money can never ever buy. Pretty awesome. It's also really hard. That looks like a lot of fun. It's actually really important to play in your work but also recognize that we do have to work. Remote really isn't for everyone. It looks like a lot of fun and it looks really amazing but it really means that there are some fundamental things. If you don't have quite a life like this, you sometimes miss out on seeing people. It can get kind of lonely. I know that often sometimes the first person that I talk to who's actually a real person is the postman and I get really excited to see him. There are some real challenges. Another thing is that you kind of miss out on that social aspect, the ping-pong, all of those types of in-office activities that you would usually have. And also sometimes there's a hard balance between how to actually divide work and life. So what we're going to talk about now is what it takes to actually be a free agent. And I think the number one thing, regardless of anything, is being able to communicate and contribute trust. Trust is the number one factor and when you're first starting off remote with a new team or you're hiring a new remote developer, the number one thing to do is to have them to contribute trust to the team every day. That doesn't necessarily mean closing a ticket. It doesn't necessarily mean even if something bad happens, it actually is just being able to work together and do the things like be there when you say you're going to be there, follow through when you're going to follow through and really provide those elements of trust to your team. Another really important thing is that when you're starting to be a remote worker, is that you know when you first started dating someone, you guys texted all the time and you emailed all the time, you sent each other photos and you had a lot of that pillow talk. Well, it's very much the same thing when it comes to working remote. I'm a big believer in over sharing and not necessarily like what I had for breakfast, but more of like what we're working on, if we have bandwidth, if we're stuck. If there's somebody new on the team, it's about including them to asking them questions about them as a human being. Often we get so into work mode that it's really important to take some of that time to communicate and learn about each other so that when we, you know, if someone's had a new baby and they're always tired on a call, you know it's because they've had a new baby and they're exhausted and they're doing the best they can. Another thing is that when you are a remote worker, your team is going to show up at all hours of the day and they're going to ping you on Instant Messenger all hours of the day. And sometimes it's very hard to actually get focused work done. So it's really skillful when you're planning your day to actually block off three hours of your day every day for focused work. And it's about again communicating with your team on when you're going to do that. Some people are early morning workers, some people are late night workers. And another thing that I always like to do when I ask all my new contractors that are coming on board is, is what do you love to work on and what do you hate to work on? And then myself as the manager, I do my absolute best to only put them on projects where they can thrive and they can focus on their skill sets. Sometimes they'll say, well I'm really good, you know, I'm a really good seamer, but I'm really wanting to learn more about commerce. So I know that in order to keep them happy and motivated, it's like okay, well let's get you on a theming project with a really rock star commerce team so they can teach and you can grow and we all can work together. Because ultimately we don't want to be siloed again with our skills. We are a collaborative team. Okay, so in learning to work remote, again I think I said this before, but it's really important to build routine. And if the routine means getting up and going to the gym and then coming home to work, for me I don't really book meetings between two and four. I book coffee with my yoga friends or my mom friends and I spend quality time in places where I don't need to have a lot of brain power because it works for me, but I have to build structure. It also means building structure with your clients. Once your clients know you work at home and if you start answering emails in the evening or on the weekends, they will reply. You may live in hell very quickly. So it's really important to also create routines and boundaries with your clients. If they're asking you to work evenings and weekends, you have a rush rate. That's how it goes. It's no different. You've got to keep your sanity. Another thing that's really great is a change of scenery. Four Kitchens has a really great blog post on how to build a standing desk for like $20, highly recommend it. It's very important to have different workspaces. I live in San Francisco. My bedroom, my office and my yoga space is all in one space because it's the nature of what it is. I also have in the kitchen, I have a standing desk area and I have a place where I can work. I also have a handful of coffee shops that I know have reliable Wi-Fi and I also have a couple of co-working spaces where people in San Francisco we often come together once a week or so to collaborate and just work together. Another great tip and trick that I recommend is having a different device in the evenings. Often, if I was to open up my Macbook in the evenings, my Skype blows up, people are trying to get a hold of me, so I have an iPad that I solely use for personal use and I don't actually have any of my work emails on it. And that's a huge lifesaver because I can be laying in bed and looking at magazines and nobody can get a hold of me and that's actually really nice for my own mental capacity. Another thing is that distractions. You know, a lot of employers say, if I send my employee home or if we start a remote company, they're going to be so distracted, there's so much going on. The reality is the office is super distracting. You're mostly your work is built into like 15 to 20 minute increments. You're lucky if you get an hour to two hours. Thank goodness for those noise-canceling headphones, but in all reality you're still getting tapped on the shoulder by your project manager or whatever chaos is coming. The nice thing about working from home is distractions are under your control. It's your choice to turn off the TV. It's your choice to find a workspace that is away from your children. It's absolutely under your control and it takes discipline because it is very tempting to get things done while you're at home and often deadlines are pressing. Another really great book I highly recommend checking out is a book called Remote from the folks that built 37 Signals Basecamp people. You're going to get cabin fever. Go out. Have fun. Figure out ways to create diversion in your life. Really check in, check out. If that means switching the pair of slippers that you use from your work slipper, your home slippers to your work slippers, create that. It means getting up and taking a shower every morning. Believe it or not, it's really easy to grab a cup of coffee and sit in your computer and all of a sudden it's 1 p.m. and you haven't had breakfast in your pajamas and the postman's here and it's all awkward. So highly recommend a morning shower. Another thing is set yourself up. Get proper workstations, get proper chairs, invest in some good tools. And I say mind the gut. The fridge is there. You're not getting out of the house as much. You're not walking around as much. You're not doing as much because you're typically at home. So there's absolutely no excuse to not get out and exercise. Okay, so now let's talk a little bit from the organizational perspective. I talked about trust. This is absolutely we need to live and die by our trust. I need to know and that goes for every single person on the team. There's nobody watching you and it's all you. So when I talk about like how to do this, there's kind of three key things. Organization, every single remote worker has to be organized. It's very hard when you have to babysit someone. If someone cannot think for themselves, they want to be a task monkey, they need to go get the 9 to 5 job and sit in the office because I personally don't have enough time and the rest of the team doesn't have enough patience to babysit those types of people. So if you cannot think on your own, remote work is not for you. Same with accountability and that means owning it, good or bad and being collaborative. The number one thing that both makes the work rewarding and awesome is the people. The people that you're going to work with are forward thinking, they're inspired, they're energized, and the amount of personal interaction you're going to have to double it to what you do in a normal office setting. So talking about just some functional tactics when working remote is number one, it's time to rethink meetings. Overall I think we always, like through whether you're in the office or out of the office, we still need to rethink meetings but especially in a distributed environment. Often a meeting can be very distracting and it can, if you are in the flow, you have the switching cost of jumping out of what you're doing into a meeting. So we try to, well at least with my team and it works different for different people but on the teams where I have one to three people on a project I meet with them two to three times a week for 15 to 20 minutes each time. For teams where I have four to six people we meet every day once a day as best we can for 25 to 30 minutes. And for teams that I have that are quite a bit larger we meet twice a day. That time that you spend, Emma Jane did some work with her yesterday at the business summit and we talked about how to interact some of the social stuff because often we get into these meetings and we want to talk about what we did yesterday what's on our plate for today or we blocked, et cetera, et cetera and where we fit in the personal time. And there's two schools of thought. Either you can book a once a week kind of fun friendly meeting that you just kind of catch up on what you're doing in your personal life and personal projects. I'm a big fan of let's just first start the meeting instead of what we did is like what we're excited about today and then we can go into whatever. Again, it's the work that matters. It's all about deliverables and in this case it's all about collaboration. There's nowhere that I could be in a comfortable position taking a top-down approach to management. It's about buying and having people work together to create the sprints and to figure out what's the best workflow. Time zones is a very common challenge for people that are distributed across the globe. Time zones is challenging for me because the devs in San Francisco don't start till noon and my East Coast devs are on the ball and they start early. They almost barely overlap and we're still in the same country. It really takes a bit of collaboration on both building remote teams that are geographically in the same time zone or you share an equal level of uncomfortability. If someone, if you've got a 12-hour time difference maybe it's 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. that you're checking in for the first six weeks and then you swap it and you do it the other way. You're always sharing an equal level of awkwardness and uncomfortability. Another really important thing is a virtual water cooler. I'm sure you guys have seen multitudes of goat videos and all types of other fun cat videos and fun things. There's a bunch of different tools. We personally use Skype and it's always a threat of chaos and fun. There's Yammer and some other great tools out there but it's really important to maintain an element of fun in doing this. A couple other things that are really important is it's really important to be all out in the open. That means that a lot of people if they work locally and then they go dark because they go to bed or they do whatever we're sometimes blocked. So it's really important to have a proper workflow and have files available use the tools that are out there to make sure that everything's really available so no one's blocked when someone goes to bed. Another really interesting thing which takes a lot of dedication and a lot of work is governance. Writing down your expectations and being clear on what that means like what tools do we use when what are the expected response times just writing it down how we're going to run things how projects work, how they get paid what's the methods of payments everything that normally would be maybe handled in conversation needs to be documented and that really helps provide transparency and organization for the team. And seeing is believing I mean it's a place where we do work in a virtual world so when you can get together it's pretty magical I've met some of my team that I've worked with for four years for the first time today or yesterday and it's magical I'm so excited there's people that I work with that are just down the street that I see once a week and there's people that I only know through video chat so having that opportunity to come together is really important. We talked about some of these challenges so pretty much time zones can be really tricky and that's really tricky when it comes across and I think the big thing is having that overlapping time not only for meetings but for working time so that we know that person A and person B are both going to be online for these three hours so that we can have our stand up and then they can actually work together nonverbal communication sometimes it's really you know texts and emails can come across really short but we don't always mean it so it takes an extra level of effort to be able to really communicate clearly with your team members I'm a sales girl through and through I love sales and smile talking was one of the first things I learned was that I'd talk on the phone and I'd smile and it would come across in the tone of my voice and to the people that I was speaking with it's the same in your texts it's really important to like speak with a kind loving like smile text because stuff can get read so wrong so quickly and it really you know it can be stress you know it can be stressful we have stressful jobs this can be intense you know deadlines clients and if we are all on the same team and we've built up that trust and we're working together and we're communicating working remote can actually be an amazing gift if it doesn't if those pieces start to fall apart it just feels like all hell's broken loose and it's absolutely like you're living your worst nightmare so definitely you know communicating clearly is such an important part another thing is having some governance for prioritization because we're on instant chat everything's ASAP everything's right now you gotta get it done so trying to figure out how to prioritize things if you need an answer by end of day email is sufficient if you need an answer within an hour IM is most likely efficient and one thing we forget to do is pick up the phone so many people just trying to solve things through email and text and sometimes it's just so much quicker and easier to jump on a quick call talk things through hear each other's pain points collaborate and boom you're done and you can move forward so choose your methods of communication appropriately and work together culture is another funny thing everybody's very concerned about culture in general in terms of like how do you cultivate it within your organization it's very tricky I think to have an in office situation and start to do remote if you're only going to send one guy off into the distance if you're going to take a real stance on having remote work team you need to commit to it in a big way and what that means is that simply when I worked chapter three I ran a support department and we had an in office team and we had a remote team and what we did is when we took our status calls the in office team sat at their desks with headphones and we were all in our work stations just like we were remote we always when we had when we were in the office and we thought like we were collaborating on something someone would take notes and put it in the Skype channel because it kept that element of collaboration together it's absolutely so important because otherwise that guy out there on the computer he doesn't know what's going on and he feels isolated it takes a really big commitment it also takes a big commitment from the management team to recognize that they're going to have to let go of control of these people and not poke them on the shoulder and actually they'll have more autonomy and they'll actually do better work and instead of asking how many hours did you spend at your desk you say show me what you built today show me what you worked on and it really changes the dynamic and how we work together one thing that I think that has been a little bit limiting for people that are contractors or remote workers is the real fact of health care and benefits my crew we are a collective of contractors no employees and that makes it tricky for some people that want to have this lifestyle but still have the very real pressures of having to take care of a family hoping Obamacare will solve some of that but the reality is is that this is a very real challenge why you may lose remote workers or contract workers as they do have a family and figuring out how to account for that and taxes taxes is a big thing that a lot of your contractors may not realize the implication and they're not saving I live in California taxes are a big thing Portland maybe you know or Texas but you know these are real things that when you are hiring a remote team is to make sure that they're very aware of their taxes and how they're going to take care of that something that always comes up as tools and I think the big thing to take away is it really doesn't matter what tool you're using as long as you're using a tool and that you're using it in a consistent manner so people can expect that when they go the number one place they're going to go to check for their workflow is this place the number one place they go and ask questions is this place and having that documented so people understand where to go is just the way to go we use teamwork we use fresh books for tracking but I mean I mean there's so many my readers of tools it really depends on what your business model is another thing is like as a as a distributed company and I think it's a lot of people that already have an in office company you already work with your clients mostly remote you mostly have phone meetings or Google Hangouts or your own Webex or however it goes so it's not much different when you're actually running a fully distributed shop the one thing to note is that it's really important to be super transparent with your clients I mean I think that goes through and through but my clients know that these that I work only with contractors my clients know that we all work from a distributed model and we're very upfront with it there's value in doing that you know in my sales pitch you're getting the top of the top because they don't want jobs right so there's the good value in bringing these types of people to the table just like I would you kind of overshare with your developers and your team and your designers in a remote environment it's really also important to be super super super available to your clients they feel most comfortable I know this has happened many times oh I'm glad you have an office I can come and knock on your door and find you so they have this like fear that you're not going to be there that you're going to be that developer that person that goes MIA or just takes off to Mexico with their code and they're gone right so figuring out a way to build trust with them early and that goes with any type of professional services arrangement but it even goes so far as if they they call and I'm busy I text them hey I'm on a call I'll call you back they email me and I'm you know make sure I have my out of office on if I'm in a plane and over a couple of weeks in a month they totally all of a sudden really trust you just like they wouldn't any other arrangement and of course show them work often and I think this goes in for any type of arrangement whether it's an office or not but really like having them engaged in your project management tools so they can see the flow of tickets they can create tickets they can assign tickets they can that you're doing regular show and tells with the client to show the work that you've done just pretty much keeping them very very engaged okay how are we doing for time here doing good so creating culture this is something that each organization will do on their own for example Lullabot is a distributed organization and they have an amazing culture I love the bots they're inspired they're energized they're building stuff they're collaborating with the community to create a virtual team is about instilling a type of culture our culture is more focused around freedom and sanity we're doing this for freedom and sanity we are breaking away from the traditional work week we don't want to work 80 hours we don't want to slave we've got a philosophy called freedom Friday which means that we still mostly do billable work but it's optional if you want to work or not I don't expect any no client meetings it's a time when if you're a creative type sometimes we make a video or do other silly things but it creates more freedom in terms of what we do because there is an 80-20 20% of our jobs are always going to suck let's not do those on Friday let's leave those tasks for Monday or Tuesday another thing is that we're really collaborative entrepreneurs and we expect the same from everybody we want each other to build each other's businesses which means we're working together and in this situation I tend to corral the clients and the chaos and all of the types of the work and so forth but sometimes my team members will work independently without me on their own projects and that's totally okay because this is about freedom it's not about driving and slaving we do what we do best we have unbashful curiosity where we're not afraid to ask questions and challenge each other in a kind way and we don't accept any drama any assholes and I'm serious I do a pretty good job at filtering out clients when they come to me and they're intense but we life-stressful enough we're doing this to have fun I'm sorry I just cannot deal with drama and it also means within the team so if there's team members that are starting to pick at each other or they don't believe in each other's development workflow we're going to hash it out we're going to get over this because we're not going to deal with this type of drama and we're going to have a good time when we're doing this as a lifestyle business which means filtering out the assholes another thing is that we aren't nine to fivers I don't expect anybody to work nine to five or put in whatever hours it's up to them how much or how little they want to work as long as they're producing results and contributing trust but a big thing is that I want everybody to check in at the end of their day and ask themselves did they do a good day's work were they productive do they feel like they contributed and if they can say yes awesome if they can say no they're probably pretty feeling not so good and they'll probably go and figure it out but you know really we're doing this because we love what we do and we want to build we want to build goodness and we also encourage silliness you know so I'm going to show you a little video here that we do a lot of user experience work Vanessa who's in the room here as well we love our clients and we love Drupal and we find that some people want to put buttons on things like everything so I'm going to show you a quick video to demonstrate some of the silliness that we do to keep the energy and excitement around around having fun and working hard hey Vanessa I just got off the phone with our client and we have a problem they have a long page homepage and bold and red and still users can't find out where to go what are we going to do the site lacks visual focus I think what we need is a great big call to action button yeah that's exactly what we should do put a button on it Vanessa on the site membership registration is down I think it might be a usability issue walk me through the registration process is there a sign up well this is graphical element but no not really okay well that's the problem then we need a button yes let's put a button on it this is a social media integrated enabled site but people are just not sharing clicking plusing liking tweeting what are we going to do Vanessa well there's the problem the like button is tiny what if every time he likes it it would get bigger like a cloud yeah put a button on it we've got a situation our client calls they want a mega mega menu that is integrated search okay well I think we can just make a big button in the shape of a magnifying glass on it yes let's put a button on it so we have this situation the support button is constantly being overlooked people just keep calling the support button needs a help button yeah let's put a button on it I got a call from Ray the CEO he's really quite concerned he wants to see more web 2.0 elements on this flat design sure let's just put this great big glossy jiggly button that pops on it yes let's put a button on it how are the users going to find the categories in a hierarchical structure in the search interface we could use buttons for the facets yes let's put a button on it audience segmentation 15 users each with 12 sub-users okay dashboard with button button button button let's put a button on it bounce rate reduction what are we going to do to keep people on the site maybe they're leaving by accident what we should do is put up a modal window where they have to press a button to confirm that they want to leave cancel for yes and go for no yes let's put a button on it the client wants a single place to publish content to multiple sites what do you think we should do oh they just need a syndication deploy button on the admin interface yes that's it we just have to put a button on it the marketing team is looking for ideas for subliminal persuasion for their fault to action we could use a white button on white background with a white text what a great solution we just got in this RFP they're asking for all kinds of things parallax, pop, digitize, monetize, tag cloud NED reference, deployment pipeline high performance put a button on it Ann it's really that simple Vanessa we need to jump on a conference call right now can we use Skype Skype is down, Microsoft is down what about Google Hangouts they don't do the Google what about FaceTime I don't think they're Mac users Webex that never works for me go to meeting download join me this is what we do with our free time that and run bad camp that launches into a little short Q&A question there is a microphone if anybody has any questions or want to chat about anything Bill Nye, the science guy Bill Nye, the science guy that photo was all there I don't know I don't have a Bill Nye the science guy I thought he was on Dancing with the Stars go ahead when you work with clients what's the average cost of a Drupal project you work on so let's say you have distributed teams working across multiple locations so how many people do you deploy on a project so what's the average cost of the projects you guys work on that's very specific actually usually my team members we work on projects where it's a one to two person show or it can scale up all the way from to a 10 person team so they vary range I've been in the industry for a while so I'm comfortable on all levels of projects it's more about who's the team members who can deliver effectively so I can chat with you more about that do you know of any specific resources for coming up with the governance type documents either examples of how other groups have set these up so that if you're setting this up for the first time you might know what to even put in but I would probably start with an outline of what types of governance like I would say for coding best practices use the Drupal coding standards that's the best place for having quality documentation it would be some of the project management stuff is really helpful to understand what lengths of sprints and how to organize them I don't know how much stuff has been open sourced but I know that Lullabot has been a distributed team forever and they tend to have quite a few resources in their site I would say some of the resources to create governance is functional like how do you want to communicate together and almost you could create it together you could say okay we're a team of three what are our expectations of working together you know do we need to be online by 10 a.m. our local time response time within Skype within an hour and just kind of creating a bulleted list of what functionally works you'll find it will change all the sudden something will come up and you're like oh we better write that down for the next guy because we didn't realize that so it's almost a bit of an organic process a couple of really good books is remote that's really functional easy to read and rework rework both 37 signal books an excellent fast reads on how to how to do more distributed work thank you hi I was I was just gonna make one maybe comment or tweak I recently took an office it's not quite walking distance from my house but it's maybe a four five-minute drive but it's kind of like in town with coffee shops around it and sandwiched lunch places for lunch and it kind of keeps you a little bit honest in that you're not walking over to the refrigerator whenever like something comes in and you want to deal with it so it's nice now I'm actually thinking also for like taking meetings from a client I'm a little outside of New York City so that that's it I think it's just like a nice a nice way to force yourself to kind of get up get dressed and and also I it's kind of like a shared office space so there's people in the hallway and you got kind of small talk and chit chat with people and peers but they're working at their own companies and doing something very different yeah I couldn't agree more with that model I I actually split my time between Canada and San Francisco and in Canada I have a office that I go to and it's $250 a month and it's a co-working space with 40 other people that I don't know but it provides a lot of structure I go there three days a week but it's very helpful so I'm glad to hear you're also using that model sure I'm wondering if you or anyone else in the room has any either specific tips or experiences for cases where you have an entirely in-office team except for one person who is perhaps say out of working remotely like for a temporary period of time due to either family things or something of that sort yeah I can definitely say I've been in that position personally and I know that that's very challenging because a lot of the in-office stuff that happens that you're missing out on it is really if that's you it's being champion for creating a communication channel for everybody to collaborate with on and to make sure and to really like ask and push for a daily check-in meeting or two times a day where you're checking in the morning and you're hearing what everybody's working on and having you know a lot of the in-office stuff that happens the stuff that isn't documented so having you know people really document their tickets and help them understand it's definitely the hardest position I think is that when you are the one person that's working remote you tend to feel very isolated so often it's up to that one person you know to reach out and to ask for more help or to connect with your with your work community and also if you are working from home and it's something that's new for you is to make sure that you take mental breaks and you get outside and you can shut down at night too hi I'm wondering when you hire someone when you talk about this is what I need for responsive behavior I mean is this something that you work on like for the first couple weeks like hey I need more from you are you checking with them very often because I feel like you know trust is such a big part of this but reality is that people if they're given a way out or they can sneak by without doing something some people may do that so that's number one and then number two is how do people track their time I know you said that in the beginning that you can work as much or as little but like if you need them to work 40 hours do you say upfront hey need you to work for 40 hours on this or is it based on I need you to just get this one thing done and then how do they track that time or are you paying them by like the thing that they're doing or questions good questions um so you know when I when I do my initial interview I'm very honest about my expectations and how it's going to work right and this is you know laying out and being really clear explaining the vision explaining the workflow talking to the other types of people and how we're going to work together um they definitely have kind of a three month trial period and it's usually a kind of a three week trial period honestly if it's if it's bad it shows up real early it's pretty easy to spot when someone's not working because there's nothing being done um and they're not communicating in there going dark so we really try to set expectations and for the first few weeks I'm the over communicator I call them every single day I check in with them on text in the morning I check in with them at night I see if they're blocked because often they're nervous and they're intimidated to actually reach out to the rest of the group for help because they're new we have a really strong team that works really well together and every once in a while one of my kind of my two shanes that I work with need help and I'll throw them into the mix and they're like well I don't know these guys very well so I'm embarrassed to ask this question that I don't know the answer to so um a lot of the first three weeks is really a really intense um helping that person and also giving them some structure to help them guide themselves through it to say okay these are your deliverables for the end of the week I'm going to check in with you on Wednesday or Tuesday and see how you're doing um and if they haven't done anything by Tuesday that'll worry me if they have nothing if they haven't even read anything I'm like wow this is a big warning flag and I'll tell that to them I'm saying you're freaking me out man you said you wanted to do this and you're not doing this and we're only on day two so you have till the end of the week or we've got problems um so it's it's you know it's playing the hard ass with like these are my these are my must haves but in a way that it's your choice on how to how to make it happen um most of my most the team is by the hour we ask I ask them to track their time at the end of each day and everybody I ask for what their availability is up you know two weeks in advance so I know someone only has 20 hours a week then I can accommodate for that and we're often in very close communication so I know that my core team is usually happy the 40 hours a week you know and trying not to get them to not work more than 40 hours a week it's really hard because they're very dedicated individuals um but it's it's finding a structure that works uh fixed bid projects in Drupal are very hard to do just hard to do so I don't ever want to put that on a developer um I think that's that's atrocious for them even though I'm a really good project manager will manage scope and you know try to keep the chaos under control inevitably something will happen or a contra module we need to go in you know fix and update there's too many variables I have one specific contractor that only works on fixed but because he works really fast it's to his advantage and he's accountable so as long as he's accountable and he's delivering I'm okay with him doing fixed projects but I only have one guy that does that out of the team that I work with so you know a lot of it is really expectation management it goes back to governance what are your expectations and it's also you know what are your expectations per project you know if this project has these types of things I need you to flag me when we reach this point or when you get this far check in with me or you know and again it's that over communicating and really collaborating more than you would in a typical office environment thank you I have the same question so thanks for answering okay no worries hi I run the Dev Shop at Advomatic and it's a fully distributed team I was interested in what you said about people we have right now the team needs to be online and on chat for at least some common time during the day because I find that interaction that happens we use IRC just to be constantly connecting with each other and as the devs are working and the front-end devs are working they're talking to each other and that real-time communication is so key but you are saying that you have we're experimenting with the idea of allowing a bit more flexibility in the work hours so how do you do both and have you noticed in letting people work whenever they want that you miss that sort of common online time we still need the common online time even if they're going to work whenever like when we had one guy in London which was very outside of our work time zone and because a lot of us are evening workers London the best time to collaborate with him was at 8am which is awful for you know the people here because it was his choice and now we had to get up really early to accommodate him so I think that overlap you have to find a way to do it not just for meetings for actually just just for collaboration just so they can chat and be like I'm working on this how's this here's this you know that interaction that you have through those and I think three to four hours a day is ideal is really ideal so I mean giving the say okay Nick you have the flexibility to work whenever you want but I need you online from 11 till 3 and then you can do the other four hours whenever you want you can block it all into the weekends but realistically these four hours are really important for collaboration yeah yeah how do you handle supporting projects that are you know in production and they launched six months ago and the client calls up and they want to change and the guy that did it is either no longer working with you or not available or working with someone else how do you handle right I have a support department because it's inevitable that your clients want support and they do disappear and they come back and I get a lot of people that are friends of mine that have sites that they are developers MIA and so forth more of a question of are you going to offer support and if so how does that going to work for you it also goes back to asking your developers what do you want to do I know very the developers that do support do it well and the developers that hate support do it awfully like they just hate it so again it goes back to asking them like what are your skill sets and do you want to do support because if they don't the last thing I want to do is take on a big Harry support client and put them on that and they leave and they are gone support people work the same way distributed they do do you schedule to say I want to make sure I always have access to certain people or you just say it's something blows up I'm going to call you no matter what you're doing it's a bit of an ad hoc situation I officially did everything I've been contracting for a long time and then I officially did the website and the big like I now have a legitimate business that we're doing this instead of sending my Drupal girl email so the intention is to really have a dedicated team that has a chunk of work both as professional service to keep their day-to-day stuff going and then a chunk of time allocated for support but there are people that want to work on support and I think that's the important part is finding the talent that wants to do it and if you're a small shop of only two to three people and you have clients that are coming back it's probably just expectation management with that client saying hey we don't typically offer support but you're a good client so we'll do what we can we'll recommend you know doing five hours a month or 10 hours a month and we'll do you know every two weeks we'll do something and then if you need emergency support this is how much it's going to cost it's just about creating systems and structure for that client to fall into hello hello let's go on good great since you tweet but I thought I'd just say this out loud so we have a shop but we also have people who work remotely like most people do and whether or not you're remote or just working in house we found that just collaboration and getting everyone on the same page with particular projects is very difficult and one thing that's really helped with people especially like remotely is a tool called Slack I don't know if you've heard about it but you can plug in things like Trello or Jira and have them fun on the channels and it does a lot of really cool integrations and it keeps people on the same page you have all your chats kind of in these same repositories and files too so I would just Google Slack and check it out it's actually helped our processes internally just for people because sure you're internal but they're still hard to communicate it's still hard to get on the same page for projects and it's much stably so for distributed teams so I would just check that out just a comment yeah thanks Andrew I've actually heard about this tool a couple of times and this is why I love coming to DrupalCon it's like you can learn from all your friends about all these new cool things so I'm definitely going to check that out yeah it's totally rad it's a lot of fun too cool great it's like Yammer Yammer's like Facebook for a private group and it's really really fun Slack cool well I guess I'm going to check that out that sounds awesome okay well we did perfect for time those thank you everyone for collaborating and coming today if you have any other questions feel free to reach out to me directly I'm Eskimo Yogi on Twitter and you can find me DrupalGirl at gmail.com if you want to talk about anything else or if you are a remote contractor and looking to do some fun work do also let me know so thank you very much have a great DrupalCon oh and all the resources that I pulled a lot of the great information from including the oatmeal comment have you seen the oatmeal comic that's working remote yeah degradation of social skills it's very funny okay thank you everyone