It's a beautiful Sunday afternoon here in Northwest Indiana and at our three CollegeKidApp headquarters.
"Wait? There are three headquarters? But you guys only have three team members? Who pays all that office space rent?"
I'm glad you asked haha. While I'm sure it doesn't come as a shock to any of you, there are times where we do in fact work but we aren't all together at once. Flexibility is one of the great aspects of working with technology and in a small team. While we're all less than a half hour apart, we don't need to all get together in order to have a productive afternoon.
So how do we determine when we'll be working and who will do what? Typically, we end each group session with a fifteen to twenty minute focus session on upcoming work days. Before we left Jeff's apartment last Friday, we sat down with a schedule of this upcoming week and discussed who would be doing what work when. We then use a Google Calendar to set up our schedule so that each team member knows who will be doing what when.
While working on a project remotely, communication is key in keeping up with the other team members. It's important that I know when Mike and Jeff will be "in their offices" and vice versa so that I can shoot them an e-mail with questions and know when to expect an answer.
AIM is another important tool for communication with our CollegeKidApp team. I use GMail as my instant messaging client, Mike uses iChat, and Jeff uses Adium. The client itself is practically irrelevant but the means of communication is essential. The technology may be 12 years old, but it works just fine in our business environment.
As I mentioned earlier, e-mail is another important means of discussion for our team. When I need to hit up Mike and Jeff at the same time, I use e-mail.
We decided early on into the project that I would be the business/communications director on the team, and using G-Mail as our e-mail client became a no brainer choice. First, Jeff and I have been using the service extensively and almost exclusively for quite a while. Second, it handles working with external e-mails addresses (such as Cameron@CollegeKidApp.com) extremely well. Third, it ties in perfectly with Google's Calendar, Docs, Blogger, and other colaboration software which we also needed to use in this project. The forth and most important factor in determining an e-mail client was price. We're doing this whole project on as small of a budget as possible and Google offers all these amazing services for the unbelievable price of free.
I could go on for hours detailing our use of Google Calendar and Docs to collaborate as well but instead I'll just let you all know that it works well and we couldn't be happier in using these services to discuss ideas and schedules. Utilizing these services will definitely be a topic in the future though. If you have any questions on how we communicate remotely as a team, feel free to e-mail me at
Cameron@CollegeKidApp.com and I'll be sure to answer your question.
