Forging a global team

Now that I've been working for a couple of weeks, it's interesting to see the group dynamics of a global team. Since the key players in my group are on Tokyo time, Paris time, and East Coast US time, the communication problems are interesting. We currently have a weekly telephone meeting on Wednesdays and the only time that works is 9:30pm Tokyo which ends up late in the afternoon in Paris, and early in the morning in America. That's kind of annoying for us, especially since these staff meeting run about two and half hours.

But the time zones aren't really that bad. We seem to have the usual collection of highly-opinionated techie types that gather in any large IT group, though. There seems to be "territories" of responsibilities (i.e. "my data center is mine", "all the MOM servers are his problem", etc.). That was a bit of problem at ISOutsource, I suppose, but it seemed to be pretty minor. Unfortunately, it seems to be interfering with smooth operations. We have enough people in enough places to do a true follow-the-sun model (I can work on things at 10am that is the middle of the night in Paris) but we can't pull that off if people don't want others working on "their" servers.

It will be interesting to see how things will work out. The managers have been kind of disconnected from things because they have been working on a big reorganization. That process is pretty much done so we'll see what changes in the next couple of weeks.