Companies who allow teleworking/commuting

[Joshua Emarico Antonio]

Hi guys!

We are looking into the possibility of allowing telecommuting (working outside the office).

I was just wondering if you know any companies that allows it employees to telecommute?

Does it work? A lot of importance seems to be placed on co-location or being in the same place in order to make the agile process to be really effective.

Cheers!

[Arup Maity]

Joshua – we allow telecommuting on selective basis. There are several things that need to be considered for this. I will try to list some of them below:

• works fine for senior members of the team better over juniors, who still need support and mentoring. 
• The person should have adequate facility at home to be able to attend to his work properly
• If you are a service company, some clients might have issues with bring their code outside. 
• Your infrastructure and process management should be capable to handle it. We have VPN, TFS and Xamun (virtual work platform) for this in addition to Skype being our corporate IM. 

In addition the teams setup schedule when they need to meet for planning, review etc. 

Hope that helps.

Cheers 

Arup 

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[mrma...@gmail.com]

Hi Joshua,

Working in different locations have been proven to be effective. 37Signals among the most vocal advocates. The best open source projects aren't exactly written under one roof. Given that, there's quite a number of principles behind why they do it this way and why it works for them. e.g., for open source projects, people on the project chose to do what they do, they choose when and when not to work, they can choose to leave anytime without adverse effect on their lives, their work is a showcase to the public, etc. 37 Signals has some of their reasons listed in that blog post.

Of course there's quite a number of horror stories as well. Yahoo! wants to bring their people back to the office because it eroded their culture. And unofficially, tempted employees to work on non-Yahoo! projects on the side. 

With regard to being Agile as per the manifesto, the belief is the best work still comes from an energised and committed team that works together in the same space. So to answer your last question, the suggestion by Agilists is to allow them to work in one place, as this is more effective.

Given you have at least two competing ideas, I wouldn't concern myself on being Agile per se, but rather would focus on what would make things better. Would allowing telecommuting make things better for you company? For your people? For your product? For your customers?

regards,

mike

Certified Scrum Master Course - July 1-2, 2013, Makati

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