I can give a very concrete example of mobile working. I recently finished
a software development project where the members of the development team (
10-15 developers over the life of the project ) were not physically
co-located at all. The job was in Los Angeles, but most of the work was
done in Silicon Valley, Washington D.C., and Germany by individual
developers on their own time schedule. The project and code management
made heavy use of the Internet and telephone.
This is not only a cheaper way to work ( low overhead ), but is in many
ways more efficient as well. We created a virtual development team to
suit the particular project. Due to the difficulty of getting everyone
into one location, meetings were only held when absolutely necessary ( a
major efficiency multiplier! ).
I normally work from home, but a couple of the developers were literally
travelling through various parts of the world as they worked on this (have
modem, will travel!).
Some stats on the type and size of this project for those interested:
750,000 lines of code, $1.5M total cost, and 10 months of development effort.
The project involved the development of the core business app for France
Telecomm's GlobeCast conglomerate.
It is believed to be the world's largest and most sophisticated
Oracle-based Intranet application and involved the development of many
tools and techniques which I still haven't seen developed anywhere else.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com