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At Function1, we have many employees who work remotely, from different countries and time zones compared to where our main offices are located. Of course, sometimes travel is necessary, and our teams come together to complete projects with clients onsite or due to security restrictions on remote work, to name a few reasons. I, personally, have only been to our Toronto office - the one closest to me - once in several years. Even with the differences in time zones and locations, we have no issues communicating with other team members and clients, and hitting milestones on all of our projects. One of the main ways we make this work is the use of various apps and services that either didn't exist or were not nearly as good, just a few years ago. We standardized on several apps and processes to enable this to work effectively.

Tools similar to Slack, allow for easy file sharing, communication, and distributed team collaboration in comparison to email or other previous-generation team chat applications. In cases where large files need to be shared among team members, Box or Google Docs are used. Remote source control repositories such as GitHub make it easy to get the latest updates anyone else has made to the project. For those times when a meeting is needed, we can use tools like RingCentral to get our team or clients collaborating on a conference call. The screen sharing feature of RingCentral also makes things easy when someone needs help troubleshooting an issue or figuring out a technical problem. Project managers are kept in the loop via our project management web app, Asana, where I can check off completed tasks and track time spent, through its integrations with time-tracking tools. Most of the time when access to actual client environments/servers is needed, a VPN connection will normally suffice. We use a variety of tools, but traditional e-mail still has a place for communication with our clients, and are happy to work with their internal tools to ensure that projects are delivered as promised.

For software development teams, I personally love to use git and Github; to me, these tools are absolutely critical for better communication and code tracking for cross-functional and distributed development teams. I can work on my code completely independent of my co-worker's tasks in my working branch, and then easily merge in the changes later. When code is ready to be merged into one of the main branches, GitHub makes it easy to create a pull request, so that your changes can be reviewed by another team member before being merged in.

With the tools available today it seems that having a distributed team working together on a project is the most efficient it has ever been. Function1 has worked on many successful projects where large amounts of the work was done by team members who were nowhere near each other geographically, but were still able to easily collaborate and work together.