Digital projects are often run with distributed teams, working in distributed companies. People are not tied to one central office, one city or even one country. In fact, people working on digital projects can work anywhere there's good enough WiFi - up a mountain, down a mine – and the best developers often really covet their freedom to work wherever and however they want to.

At WunderKraut we value self-organised teams, and so we have a mixture of working practices. We have over 140 staff in at least 9 countries across Europe, with some of the best Drupal developers around. In some countries we have physical offices; in others there are people but no office at all. All of our physical offices have people who are based there but often work from somewhere else - the client's office, their own home, an airport terminal or on a train, a coffee shop, or just wherever they fancy that day. Many of our client projects have colleagues from a number of different countries working together, co-ordinating across several timezones and different cultures, and using different toolsets. And sometimes you can go a long time without even being in the same room as another colleague.

So, what do you do when you're part of a distributed team?

• How can you feel connected with others when you're all by yourself for so much of the time?
• How can you keep colleagues involved in a project when they rarely see each other face-to-face?
• What about part-time staff - how can they feel they belong?
• What do you do about timezone differences?
• Can you recreate hanging out in the office kitchen in a digital context?
• How can you address cultural differences in different countries?
• What about the language thing?
• What can you do to make working life fun when you're not able to just kick back chat to the person at the desk next to you?
• Do you need people to all use the same toolsets, and what happens when they're different?
• How do you bring new staff into a distributed business, and how can you bring people into a distributed team who've never worked in one before?
• What can go wrong with distributed teams?
• And what can be done to make sure things go right?

This session will look at all of these questions and more in a conversational manner, with experiences from teams and projects in Wunderkraut and beyond.

About the Speakers

James Nesbitt and Joe Baker are senior developers with WunderKraut. James is based in the Latvian office and lives in Riga. Joe is based in the UK office and lives in Birmingham. They have worked for years in teams with colleagues at the next desk and 1, 2 and even 8 or 9 timezones away. They both enjoy and struggle with distributed teams, and have contributed to tools, techniques and patterns that make working miles apart more manageable, and sometimes even fun.

Wunderkraut is Europe's largest Drupal service provider, employs one of the largest Drupal development teams worldwide and delivers measurable client happiness and business value.