A practical checklist for working with a remote team

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Run through this the next time working with a remote team comes up.

Clear scope protects the client at least as much as it protects the agency. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

The checklist

• Write things down, because hallway context does not exist
• Overlap hours matter more than time zones
• Regular short calls beat rare long ones
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

What it costs to ignore

Write things down, because hallway context does not exist. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

In practice

Strategy work is mostly deciding what not to do, and writing it down so it stays decided. Three things worth confirming about working with a remote team before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Regular short calls beat rare long ones — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.