{"id":1383,"date":"2008-11-16T15:59:37","date_gmt":"2008-11-16T22:59:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/2008\/11\/16\/whose-time-is-it\/"},"modified":"2019-08-07T14:33:27","modified_gmt":"2019-08-07T21:33:27","slug":"whose-time-is-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/?p=1383","title":{"rendered":"Whose time is it?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"time\u00a0\u00a0 Global projects.\u00a0 Teams in five different time zones.\u00a0 Team members traveling.\u00a0 “We will meet again on the telcon at 5 on Tuesday.”<\/p>\n

When?\u00a0 Tuesday your time?\u00a0 my time?<\/p>\n

Some of us may have a calendar system that automatically can communicate and translate date\/time.\u00a0 Wonderful (and horrible in other ways that we won’t go into here).<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, there are still many “opportunities” for confusion.\u00a0 Ok, maybe it’s not the most critical concern, but many of us have lost time and money (and perhaps sanity) by dropping something critical due to a “late”\u00a0 call, or a “missing” deliverable.<\/p>\n

So, a couple of things pop up for me.\u00a0 First, I’m seeing projects using some kind of common time.\u00a0 Of course, some organizations have been doing this for a long time.\u00a0 Most familiar might the military use of “Zulu time,” which is related to what we used to call Greenwich mean time (GMT), which is related to the modern UTC (Universal Time – Coordinated). (see http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Coordinated_Universal_Time<\/a>\u00a0 for more info).\u00a0\u00a0 In fact, I’ve seen a few projects using UTC as their project standard; there is no ambiguity about time.<\/p>\n

While I certainly like the benefits of no ambiguity, I think a more subtle but more powerful force may be in play.\u00a0 The use of UTC can be a unifying force; perhaps only symbolically at first, but practically with continued use.\u00a0 Our actions seem to happen just a little bit more as one team.\u00a0 One might note that the People’s Republic of China uses one time for the country.<\/p>\n

The second thing that pops up for me is dominance.\u00a0 Whose time is it?\u00a0 Sure, using UTC can be a “neutral” convention.\u00a0 I’m talking more about when we meet together — who has to make more time concessions?\u00a0 Who comes in early, or stays late, or wakes up in the middle of the night?\u00a0 Being on the west coast of the US, I’ve been on lots of projects where we come in early to catch our collegues in Europe, stay a little later to speak with colleagues in\u00a0 eastern Asia, and then (might as well) stay a bit longer to catch up with our collegues in India.\u00a0 I’ve seen some projects rotate timing, so that no team has to “time bend” all the time.\u00a0 Perhaps the most radical, and something I’ve seen just a few times, is to permanently (for the life of the project) adjust what is “normal” so that all teams are scheduled to work in such a way that there is some overlap every working day.<\/p>\n

What are you doing in this globally extended project environment?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0\u00a0 Global projects.\u00a0 Teams in five different time zones.\u00a0 Team members traveling.\u00a0 “We will meet again on the telcon at […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":23,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"give_campaign_id":0,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,5],"tags":[320,64,166,1377,222,85,356,121,433],"class_list":["post-1383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-global","category-time-management","tag-challenges","tag-communication","tag-cooperation","tag-global","tag-global-teams","tag-meetings","tag-project-coordination","tag-time","tag-time-zone"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/23"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1383"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14109,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1383\/revisions\/14109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/svapm.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}