We had a spirited discussion at the Agile Boston event.  Many folks agreed that some of our methods would be useful in their own projects.  I promised that I would post the slides of the talk outline, shown below.

Many of the attendees agreed that they could use these ideas to accelerate their teams, and that they are part of the 89% of teams that are distributed.  I won't go over all the points here in detail.

I got a number of questions about team culture and socializing.  If the team is distributed, how do we bring new people into the "culture"?  How do they socialize?  I have a few standard brush offs for this.  Apparently they aren't convincing enough to put the question aside.  Here it goes again.

• We save a lot of time by getting straight to work.
• Team culture is an OUTPUT of high productivity, not an input.  If the team is successful, they feel good about each other.  If you have ever worked on a high performance team, you probably saw how these teams develop their own vocabulary.
• We do socialize the same way that kids socialize with their neighbors, on facebook, chat, etc.  Real world socializing is basically becoming distributed socializing.

I threw out a challenge: Would you go against me on a four month, $200K project, with a different methodology?  Nobody took up the challenge.  This methodology, derived from open source, Web 2.0, and agile, is pretty highly optimized for that situation.  The next step is to adopt some best practices for bigger, slower enteprise projects.

One of things that I brought up was the idea that the analysis in the Mythical Man Month might be wrong, and consequently, I might recommend different ways to manage a big project.  Dan Mezick sent me an interesting followup question about that, which I will cover tomorrow.