Twitter – a New Tool in my Offshoring Toolbox
Eric Pan asked an interesting question on Linkedin – “Other than IM, email and phone call, I am thinking if twitter can improve communication with offshore teams in software development. Do you have any success story to share?”
The immediate reaction of the community was quite negative, e.g. “…the security is horrible and the 140 character limit (as noted in other answers) precludes its effective use… ” or “ … It will be a big distraction. I am not sure how you envision project communication…” I am afraid people behind these answers totally missed the point. I found the question rather thought provoking and after giving a few minutes of attention came to conclusion that twitter could be a rather helpful tool in some type of outsourcing / offshoring projects.
Twitter is quite a new phenomena and in its buzzpower its is successfully wrestling with Facebook and Google, it remains to be seen how rich he’s going to make its founders and whether it will stay for a while or fade away like many fads of the net era.
So far I had a few attempts to become a regular twitter and found neither pleasure nor purpose in it. Some say it could be helpful for my blog promotion, some suggest that it’s mandatory for building your personal brand. Not sure, I will probably give it another try… but that is not the topic here.
On the other hand communication is a backbone of offshoring engagements. One can not overestimate importance of communications for running teams of all kinds, 100 fold so for distributed ones. So if there is a tool that helps in communication processes it at least is worth careful consideration. There are plenty of tools we already have at our disposal – face to face meetings, phone conf calls and one on one discussions, email individual and group, intranet, wiki and sharepoint, chats, do we need another one? Well, is there a gap that needs to be covered? Probably there is none. Is there some way to improve current coverage, I bet!
Going back to twitter origins – it is all about status reporting. What are you doing? In technolingo that translates to What are you working on? Or What is your current status? That makes total sense. Skype chat is for discussions and instant updates. Twitter provides a vehicle of distributing status updates to a group of people in rather non-invasive form without clutter and overhead of email. The follower model is a solid alternative to to:/cc:/bcc: where the sender has to determine distribution list, putting the distribution in the hands of the receiver makes a lot of sense in a group setting.
Are there limitations to twitter – oh boy, where do I start? – but that’s not the point, if instead of nixing the idea for the tool limitations you take a proactive positive look you suddenly find many features that could be indeed very helpful.
I see a good fit to use of twitter in several areas of my offshore SDLC, for example milestone notifications on regression test runs, build reports, etc. There are also multiple possibilities in other areas, take for example production support / uptime notifications…
Not too long ago tools like YIM or Skype were considered bad practices and were banned from corp. IT world, for exactly the same reasons my distinguish LinkedIn colleagues are bashing Twitter today. Will see how this one pans out… let’s reconnect in a year or so?
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Slowing Down, no Intentions to Stop
This month has been exceptionally busy for me and I had almost no time to put against anything but my day job, unsurprisingly so my blogging debt started to grow at a pretty good pace. There were a plenty of articles published in the blogs I follow, many industry news worth discussion knocked on the doors daily, and despite serious slowing down in the rate of posts I saw a notable increase in traffic.
When it comes to blogging I face a few serious challenges, first of course being ESL. As a matter of fact ESL has been a huge mental obstacle to overcome, it took a lot of internal and external pushing before I could step over the fact that I won’t be able write to even my own standards of quality needless to say to the benchmarks established in technical blogosphere by top notch professionals.
Other ones were concerns so typical for a techie:
Of course like anyone else I also have to deal with shortage hours in a day, occasional writer’s blocks and gazillion of other challenges any blogger deals with.
When I realized how much time blogging is going to take from my day and how unproductive I was my visceral reaction was to follow my management approach: do what you do the best – delegate the rest. And I decided to hire a ghost writer. In theory it appeared like a great idea – I just tell a ghost writer what I think about a particular topic and s/he will write it up… In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, in practice there is. My fabulous idea did not work out, not for the lack of offers though:
I put a project request on several freelancing sites (see those plus more on my list of places to find freelancers). I got more offers that I could look at in just a few days. The price varied from $2 to $50 an hour. Many of writers who replied to my post did not even red the post, some did not understand it. The remaining minority either asked for rates I could not possibly afford or after a brief discussion with me bailed out. After I went though ~100 bids there were a couple still standing, and they only made me realize that time-wise I won’t see any savings and the only thing I could benefit by using a ghost writer would be grammar, SEO, and other important yet secondary aspects.
So I ended up in square one with a notebook in my laps blogging away while BARTing. The last couple months brought more and more to my plate. Isn’t it strange that poor economy, slower business and a fewer opportunities do not mean less work? So even my office commute doesn’t offer much time for pragmatic outsourcing. But I have no intentions to stop, at least yet. There is still so much to cover…
March 24, 2009 Posted by Nick Krym | News, Articles, Thoughts and Comments | Freelancing | Leave a Comment