101 Project Management Problems and How to Solve Them

83. How do I best deal with time zone issues?

In a perfect world, project teams would all sit together. This ensures ongoing robust informal communications and effective teamwork, and (mostly) lets everyone get adequate sleep. Real projects can’t always co-locate, so you need to do what you can to compensate.

Planning for Around-the-Clock Staffing

There are some advantages to a distributed team. “Follow the sun” operations afford better coverage and might, for some types of activities, significantly reduce duration estimates. If the work is sufficiently simple that it can be quickly picked up and advanced by contributors working independently, assign it to one contributor in India for one half of the day and to another in the United States for ...