Work Without a Location

by: Colin Gerety

Futurists have been talking for quite some time about a movement away from static company structures toward a world where work is accomplished by global teams assembled for a short period of time to work on specific problems. Fastwater's experience shows that, for once, they may be right.

Kiva  is a Colorado company, but our work is truly global. In previous engagements (with Fastwater) we worked with a customer that has its headquarters in Norway, but product development takes place in Norway, Lithuania and Colorado. Another project had us collaborating with people scattered across California. Kiva itself does not have central offices; each of us has a home office. We rarely  meet face-to-face, yet we work closely together and talk as a group at least once a week.

This type of worldwide close collaboration would have been prohibitively expensive a few years ago. Now, thanks to ubiquitous fast internet connections and a reasonable world-wide phone network, it is one of the most economical ways to develop products. It does, however, require discipline and a close attention to how work is partitioned.

How Does it Happen

In the past couple of decades, companies have worked to reduce their employee count, and contract to specialists for everything outside of their core competency. For example, in the late 1980s Hewlett-Packard had a workforce of about 90,000 employees and total revenue of around 10 billion dollars a year. Right before it split off Agilent Technologies, HP had a workforce of about 90,000 employees and revenue around 40 billion per year. Over those 10 years, revenue quadrupled while the head count remained constant. Some of this came about as a result of a shift from professional to consumer products (more revenue, slimmer margins). However, a large portion came from contracting to outsiders rather than building internally.

At the same time, there has been a tremendous increase in investment in high-tech businesses. New businesses need to build their products and services as quickly as possible. To get started, they often buy services rather than build internal structures. For years small businesses have brought in outsiders to do their accounting, handle human resources, or run the cafeteria. These days it is common to see whole research and development efforts contracted to outside consultants.

To support these trends, a large number of new businesses have sprung up. Typically these firms have very specialized capabilities. We work with one firm known for expertise with a particular database. Another company does human factors analysis. Kiva specializes in helping firms with spot development work - efforts that focus on Internet technologies and that require senior development expertise that exceeds the available in-house development capacity.

The trend is for each business to concentrate on a particular area of expertise. This means that no business stands alone. Everyone relies on outsiders to provide products and services outside of the core competencies. When a firm is brought in and proves reliable, it is often asked to provide additional services either through sub-contracting or references to other firms. In this way a network of companies is formed. Kiva is sometimes brought in to a company because of a reference. We, in turn, often send work to people and companies we have worked with in the past.

The end result is a network of capabilities that can be brought to bear on business problems. For the economy as a whole, this is enormously productive. In a very short period of time a complete team of experts can be assembled to tackle a problem. It can be disbanded just as quickly. Our typical engineering engagement lasts two to four months, starts with an incremental product enhancement and ends with a product in the marketplace. This allows the client to completely test an idea in the market without the commitment of additional staff. New product development is a small part of the product lifecycle and the skills and temperament required to be successful are different from those needed to needed to maintain and expand a product. As a result, it makes sense to outsource this work.

The efficiencies gained from temporary teams are increased when physical location is removed from the equation. Because we can work effectively with people we rarely see, we can call on a worldwide pool of expertise with relatively small travel expenses. With most clients, some face-to-face meetings are held, but they tend to be infrequent.

How Does it Work

All but the smallest projects are collaborative. Two keys to distributed collaboration are: frequent communication, and reducing the need for communication. That is, because communication is both necessary and difficult we have to make a special effort to communicate, but we also partition work so that, as much as possible, the individual pieces are independent.

It is important to understand that we have not changed what is communicated, but how. To see this, consider the communication that typically takes place in an office setting.
Type Attributes Typical Content Work Function
"Water cooler" conversation Informal, unstructured. Accidental meeting. Catch up on personal lives, discussion of projects, sometimes unrelated projects. Personal bonding, trust building, sometimes cross fertilization of ideas.
Email Impromptu communication without interruption. Usually on a single topic. Can be anything from arranging a lunch time to a substantial explanation of the motivation behind a new business. The fact that a written record is left behind makes this communication more formal than a conversation.
Phone Impromptu communication with interruption. Much the same as email. For technical work within an office, I think the phone has largely been supplanted. More common when someone is out of the office. For sales, the phone remains the main form of communication.
Instant messaging Impromptu communication with interruption. Like a phone call, but easier to ignore. Personal bonding, trust building, quick easy contact for answers to simple questions.
Work meeting Pre-arranged time to discuss a particular topic Generally single topic discussion among a set of people. Conversation is often supplemented with drawing at a whiteboard. Notes are often taken and work assignments made. Collective problem solving and creation of common understanding.
Formal meeting (announcements, checkpoint...) Pre-arranged time to discuss a particular topic Generally a presentation rather than a discussion. Announcement of information to create shared understanding. Sometimes it is important that everyone receive exactly the same information at the same time.
Written material More formal than email. Often a wider distribution. Well thought out presentation of material. Communication to a wide audience. Some of these documents may be archived as part of a formal project record.
Published material Polished, reviewed material. Often available outside the organization. The "face" of the company to the outside world.
Internal web pages Analogous to written material.
External web pages Analogous to published material.
Specialized Systems Source control systems, defect management systems, customer relationship management ...

Of these, the only means unavailable to a distributed organization are: water cooler conversation, work meeting, and formal meeting. We partially compensate by shifting to other means for the same results. For example, our weekly Kiva meeting is preceded by email reports on activities of the last week. These often include personal tidbits about trips and family of the kind that would normally come out in a casual meeting in a hallway. In the engineering group we call each other or start an instant messaging session as a virtual "head over the cubicle".

There are several aspects of these face-to-face meetings that are more difficult without this contact.

Establishing Trust

Most of our engagements have occasional face-to-face meetings where all organizations are represented. Sometimes the whole team is present. These meetings tend to occur at times when a conventional organization would hold a formal meeting. For example, project initiation or completion of a major milestone. Although we could probably do without them, these physical meetings seem to be important in building trust and camaraderie. The same is true within Kiva. Several times a year we get together in the same room at the same time.
Establishing trust is a time consuming process that involves a series of engagements with progressive trust and disclosure. The first engagements tend to be low risk and with low information disclosure. As trust is earned, the engagements can be higher risk with more information shared. However, trust is somewhat transitive. That is, if I trust you and you trust Bob, I am more likely to trust Bob. In a business setting trust is also hierarchical. If you employ me and tell me you want me to work with Bob, I do.

This is one advantage of working within a network of specialists. If I trust one of my specialists and need something outside of her realm, I am likely to trust her recommendation. As new organizations and people are pulled in to a project, the network of trust relationships expands and builds. Each new employer gets the benefit of the trust gained between partners on other projects.

Culture and Work Style

There are cultural differences that are regional and organizational and personal. A recent issue of "Strategy + Business" has an article Dilemma Doctors that looks at how national differences affect business. In addition to these broad national trends, there are differences in company work styles. On top of this there are, of course, individual differences in how people prefer to work and interact. We are fortunate that English is spoken by much of the technical community around the world.

It is important to understand that there will be differences. When people do not meet face-to-face or when someone is not using his native language, the chances for misunderstandings and resentment are greatly increased. In our experience there are antidotes.

Being part of a network helps with these cultural and style clashes. Not only are companies specialized in their capabilities; they also tend to have signature working styles and values. As is natural, close associations form between firms that have compatible styles and values.

At Kiva we change our work and interaction patterns to fit what the client desires. However, like everyone else, we have a preferred way of working. Kiva is a small group of loosely associated consultants that come together to work on particular projects. As such , we do not place much value in hierarchical organizational structures. We like open and direct communication between individuals. We are results, not process, oriented. We introduce just enough process to make sure that the results are as desired. Among ourselves, we expect everyone to do whatever needs to be done, whether that is optimizing a search algorithm or going on a customer visit. The work we do, creating new products in new markets, favors this style.

As a result, we tend to work for and with small, fast moving companies. When we do, cultural and work style clashes are smaller. That means these clients and partners are more likely to recommend us to others. When they do, our new clients are also likely to share these traits. That is, our work is naturally self-selecting to avoid many work style conflicts.

Meetings without a white-board

Face-to-face technical discussions around a white-board can be extremely productive. We do not have a real replacement for these meetings. We do have phone/web-conference meetings where a desktop is shared (everyone sees the same thing). This does, however, take the meeting from a collaboration to a presentation. As a result, brainstorming tends to happen more slowly over email or instant messaging. This seems to be effective, but has a different feeling and is less exciting than an effective technical design meeting around a whiteboard.

Serendipitous discoveries

Years ago when I worked for HP, I used to bicycle in to work. One morning I had a conversation in the locker room with a manager in another department who ran to work. He told me about some performance tuning occurring in his lab. This serendipitous conversation initiated work that had a real effect on my project.

This type of accidental interaction can be an advantage of a physical office. However, serendipitous discoveries do not happen as a result of proximity, they happen as a result of communication. The trick is, to communicate as widely as you would in an office, but to do so by other means. We at Kiva  read a tremendous amount. We use email to forward each other articles. We speak on the phone. We contact people outside our "normal" circle for business and personal reasons. All of this adds up to an effective communication network, and that is what fosters discoveries.

A few words on working from home

When we tell people that we work from home offices, there are two common reactions. At Kiva we have some advantages over most organizations. We are all very disciplined and experienced. Working from home gives us flexibility in our personal and professional lives, but we all understand that the work needs to be done. So we sit down and do it. We work hard to communicate, so there is usually no question about what people are working on and how the tasks are progressing.

Because we have no technical support staff, each of is in charge of our own infrastructure. We set up our own networks, install our own software and perform our own backups. If something goes wrong, we fix it ourselves. For us, this is not a great burden.

I mentioned flexibility in our personal and professional lives. This is a real advantage of this style of working. On the one hand, it may mean answering e-mail at 5:30 am to make sure European partners can respond before the end of their day. On the other hand, it makes it possible to coach soccer in the afternoon or take a needed nap in the middle of the day. We have no commute time. It requires discipline to get the work done, but the freedom to arrange our own schedules is liberating.

Conclusions

At Kiva we commonly work on projects where a set of geographically dispersed people from several organizations are temporarily brought together to solve a problem. Far from being a difficult environment in which to work, we find it delightful because we get to work with world-class experts on fast-moving projects.

When there is no office where workers congregate, more attention must be paid to communication. However, this is generally not a handicap. There are technologies and work styles that make this an extremely effective environment.