[svlug] Telecommuting?

[Don Marti]

begin Michael Long quotation of Tue, Aug 29, 2006 at 07:41:25PM -0700:

> I work 100% from home. It's great. I would not want to be my boss 
> however. If I were a manager of a group of people or running my own 
> company I wouldn't encourage working from home and I wouldn't 
> specifically hire work at home employees.

You need mastery of social and collaboration software
to make this work.  If the team is still at the
one-step-above-typewriters stage, blasting email
attachments around, you're likely to be pretty
dysfunctional unless you're usually in the same
room together.

If you can get people to use common social software
that keeps track of, for each task:

* What the task is

* Who has it

* Status

* Deadline

and has a free-form way to add notes, you've got the
basics, and can consider doing the all-remote work
force thing.  Then the manager can spend less time on
"what is going on and who has the last version?"

Interesting social software sighting: Mark de
Visser uses one Google spreadsheet per team member.
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-qjO174U8f6MNIIOdtGt4jjA-?cq=1&p=34

But you'll probably want a BTS or something like one.
Thomas A. Limoncelli's "Time Management for System
Administrators" is an excellent book on managing in
general, and recommends RT.

http://bestpractical.com/rt/

I also like RT, but I haven't administered it or
managed using it, just a satisfied one user of
several.

-- 
Don Marti                    
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org           LinuxWorld: August 14-17, 2006, San Francisco