During the time off with the new baby, I was able to catch up on some reading. I came across two great articles that are worthy of reading.
The first is from Esther Derby. She wrote an article on the Scrum Alliance site entitled 7 Questions to Ask Yourself Before You Begin Coaching. It’s a great article, and covers some very good points. If you read it close enough, you find that underlying a lot of the points is that you need to have the ability to communicate, and especially to listen.
That’s where Michael Webb’s article Eight barriers to effective listening comes in to play. In it, he covers some excellent barriers that we’ve all put up on our road to clearly communicating. For example, Michael says, about “Knowing the Answer”, the first barrier:
A simple strategy for overcoming the “knowing the answer” barrier is to wait for three seconds after the speaker finishes before beginning your reply.
Three seconds can seem like a very long time during a heated discussion, and following this rule also means that you might have to listen for a long time before the other person finally stops speaking. That’s usually a good thing, because it gives the speaker a chance to fully vent his or her feelings.
The little one is doing well – she gained 10 ounces in 3 days! and has been keeping her mom and dad quite busy. It was a great Father’s Day present to have her home, and it will be tough to head back to work on Wednesday. Maybe I can keep working on a way to virtual pair program…
I’ve found that virtual pairing works well just using vnc and skype. I run skype on a second machine when I host to make the workstation snappier. Sometimes it’s even better than jockying for physical space! Light weight headphones are key; I’ve had good luck with the Parrott TalkPro Xpress (http://www.vxicorp.com/storefront/detail.asp?PRODUCT_ID=200807)
Thanks for the reply, Chris. The challenge is that when you are virtual pairing it becomes harder to grab a whiteboard and sketch ideas, and other things become harder overall.
We use a point-to-point link between our offices, so we get pretty good quality video between them, and it is still just not the same as being there.
Although good idea about the second machine – I’ll keep that in mind!
Cory,
I’ve been struggling with how to do some form of pairing on distributed teams. One thing I have found that really helps maintain the exchange of ideas is ping ponging. (see http://sean-carley.blogspot.com/2006/04/ping-pong-programming-no-pairing_08.html). If you have video while you work, I think ping ponging would help a great deal but I feel your pain on the white boarding. Maybe a distributed drawing app would help alleviate that some, though certainly not all the way. Let us know your progress. This is an important issue to many of us.