Trip to become the best!

Measure collaboration?

What can you do with a distributed team? How do you control collaboration? What if you can get your whole team together for a few weeks. It surely will bring collaboration a real good push or boost. 
First of all, it’s very hard to measure progression in collaboration.

Let’s start with explaining what we are trying to achieve. The first thing you need is some kind of baseline. The baseline here is:

1. We are a new team and we begin from scratch and are trying to find out how to work best,
2. We don’t know each other (we all have a way we’d like to be treated),
3. The half of the team in the Netherlands know quite a bit of the software, the other half in Kiev doesn't,
4. We have no bond with each other.

These points need to be improved, so that we eventually act like one good oiled machine. The faster we can act like one team, the faster we can accelerate this machine and the faster we improve. So the first question is: how can we measure each point. Well, that’s quite difficult. How do you measure a bond between people and how do you know someone feels good with the way he/she is being treated? How do you know that the knowledge of the program is actually increased, should we make an exam for it?

The second question is: Why can’t we just stay at our current location and improve from there? Let me explain something here. When you know nothing, it costs a lot of time to get even a little bit better, because you got no grip or something you can hold on to. For example: when you don’t know how to talk, making yourself understandable is really hard. If no one teaches you how to talk, then the road to the level you can do almost anything can be very long. It blocks you for a lifetime from exponentially growing. But if someone teaches you how to talk, the time is kept short and you have more than enough time for growth after that.

Conclusion

In other words: we need to communicate best to improve as a team and we need to communicate best as fast as we can. Therefore we need to focus on how to collaborate the best we can. And we can do that best together in one location.