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Voyage Support

Jim Medlock edited this page Feb 9, 2018 · 1 revision

Ensuring Accountability & Team Support

A big challenge in remote software teams is navigating challenges and regularly re-assessing the state of the team to ensure the opportunities are unlocked for committed members.

Support channels:

Chingu-X & Tools

Chingu is a platform to launch opportunities for developers, but another part of Chingu is researching and developing ways to better facilitate those opportunities. We call this global collaboration lab Chingu-X, and they built:

  • The Wizard Acts & Milestones - This is a tool to provide structure and a project roadmap for teams to follow. Project Managers will log the team's progress here which will also help us determine what teams need support.

  • The Wizard Standups - This is a tool to better facilitate team communication. It will ping you twice a week to answer a few short questions (ex. What did you work on? What are you going to work on? What is blocking your way?) and relay that information back to your team.

Support from Chingu Facilitators

  1. Weekly Check-in - This weekly check-in with Chingu will be sent out at the start of every week and will be our way of assessing team health and to help you be accountable to your learning and team.

  2. Weekly HeartBeat powerup - HeartBeat is our tool to determine what teams need support. We use the Weekly Check-ins as well as slack & github metrics to give every team a status of:

  • GREEN (progressing well)
  • YELLOW (may need some support)
  • RED (team is in trouble, may need significant support or to be closed down)

Right now it is largely done manually, but Chingu's Lead Data Scientist @trion is currently working a machine learning-assisted tool to help automate this process. It's a time consuming process and part of the reason the Weekly Check-ins are so important. I (Chance) will spend Monday-Wednesday powering up the HeartBeat before...

  1. Team Support Day! - This day will happen every Thursday/Friday (and Saturday if need-be). We will use the insights from HeartBeat to determine what teams need assistance each week. Anything from troubles gaining momentum to looking for a replacement for a member who got a job, this day is for making sure teams are on the right path.

Community Support

Each Chingu Voyage has a few hundred developers from all levels who come from diverse backgrounds. Viewed as a collective brain, each Voyage is both a marvel of diversity and an excellent resource for you and your team. I encourage all teams to consider the collective brain of the Voyage as a team-mate.

You can access this collective brain in the following ways:

  • Slack channels - #ask-for-help-here, #community-cht, #Project Managers, #resource-treasures
  • Weekly Check-ins - there will be an opportunity to let us know of any improvements or ask for help on this check-in. For example, if you say your team needs help with Auth0, we may be able to find someone to send your team's way to help.
  • Chingu Medium Publication - Every week Chingu will publish a Weekly Update on the Chingu ecosystem and all the wild projects & news from Chingu members.