It is common in the IT world to work with distributed teams. This can be teams which collaborate from different locations working in different time zones. At the end of the day one team e.g. in India would pass their work to the team in Europe. The team in Europe would pass their work at the end of the day to the team in America and so on.
Our organization has a different challenge. We work mostly from three different locations/countries within Europe. All team fragments are within the same time zone. We had to learn during the time how to optimize the collaboration between team members.
Different Languages
While our team native languages are German, Swedish and Serbian, we had no doubt to use English as the only communication language on team level.
Project Management
While the market is full of PM software, the most of them are desktop versions. We considered using Team Foundation Server. It turned out to be to complex for our use case. Finally BaseCamp (37Signals) a simple and web based Project Management software was like tailored for Singleton Solutions. Using different gadgets for BaseCamp, allows the management members to contribute from almost everywhere on the projects.
Source Code Repository
As many software development companies, also Singleton Solutions is working on different platforms with different programming languages, such as C#, objective C and SQL. We code within different editors, such as Visual Studio and xCode and on different OS. As we like to keep the things simple, we searched for one source code repository, which supports us in every environment. We reached this with VisualSVN on the server side and TortoiseSVN on the client side. There are also many SVN add-ons for all the mentioned editors which can be used optionally.
Communication
As we are developing our solutions by integrating some of "extreme programming" aspects, we strongly believe that our clients should contribute during the development process. Our clients are also using BaseCamp. This makes life so much easier, we can tell...
Efficiency & Time Tracking
This is a very critical mission. As in every company, we also needed an easy measurement method allowing as to know our productivity, efficiency and measure our working time. RescueTime does the job very good.