Location in Blogger

This is my first post with the location feature enabled. Wonder what that is going to look. Did not make my blog look any different. Got to research more.

Duchess wants a Kindle.

This has nothing to do with distributed development. But my cartoons featuring my favorite dogs; Duchess and Ditto. Given a chance I would create all my documents as drawings accompanied by voice. Makes it easy for my colleagues and the executives to understand my point. Note: Not all my colleagues speak English as their native tongue. It all boils down to telling a story really. For heaven's sake, when will we break away from the PowerPoint people.

by sprabu | Create your own Cartoon at www.toondoo.com

Value of Collaboration by the dean of Pixar

This speech by Pixar University's Dean has interesting points on the value of collaboration. He talks about how people in Pixar build on what others do rather than question what others do. This is important in the web 2.0 world.

Try Using Twitter to connect your teams

Marcia Conner talks about how twitter helps her bring a multidimentional perspective to work.

I have similar experiences. My colleagues who work out of distributed offices follow me on twitter and I follow them. We learnt much more about each other then we otherwise would have. It is breaking down barriers and encouraging my colleagues to understand each others personality a bit more than we otherwise would have. Try it out. Twitter.com

You can read about the benefits at Marcia's post in her Fast Company Blog.

Bringing customers on the same page

Bringing a common understanding among customers who will be distributed around the country or the world is as valuable as bringing a common understading among your team members.

I assume you know the value of bringing customers together to talk to each other and share ideas. I am not going to go into the benefits of that. I am going to talk about how to make it happen more often, effectively with less money.

Bringing customers together is normally done via conferences, which are expensive and time consuming affairs. Web 2.0 technology based Collaboration and community tools have addressed the problem effectively.

Last week I started a community site for a select group of customers and posted product requirements in the site. In today's web conference I encouraged all customers to go there edit the requirements document (not just comment on the document). I am not sure how the group is going to respond. But I am going to try until they start to collaborate.

I had success with internal team members and I am confident of succees with customer collaboration as well.

This is the real test.

Tools used: We use Jive Clearspace for cusotomer communities.