Nobody was in the same room.
One person was upstairs. Three were in a conference room on another floor. One was home in Denver. I was home in New York.
We were all looking at the same problem through Google Hangouts.
I recorded a short video because the collaboration felt new enough to save. Developers and WebOps people had joined the call, shared what they could see, and started troubleshooting without waiting for everybody to move into one physical space.
“Teamwork across locations -- very cool.”
That was the subject line. The excitement was genuine.
Remote technical work already existed, of course. We had people outside New York and plenty of tools for chat and calls. This felt different because the video room was becoming a place the work could happen, not a weak substitute for the real meeting.
Nobody needed a formal invitation from “remote strategy.” The issue existed, people opened a room, and whoever had useful context joined from wherever they were.
The location list made the point better than any remote-work policy. Four rooms. Two cities. One incident.
The technology was slightly awkward. The important part was that people used it without turning the tool itself into the event.
Distributed operations would only work if a person at home could see enough context to help and a person in the office remembered to include them.
The video also made the invisible part visible to leadership. This was not one person working alone from a kitchen table. It was one team spread across the map.
This time, it worked.
I sent the video around because I wanted us to do more of it.