Management By Timeshifting Around

Definition

Management By Timeshifting Around (MBTA) is a coordination strategy where managers across distributed development sites deliberately shift their working hours to create overlapping time windows with remote teams. Rather than requiring all team members to maintain identical schedules, MBTA distributes the burden of temporal adjustment across the hierarchy, typically placing it on designated mid-level liaisons (team leads, project managers) who stay awake during off-hours to facilitate synchronous communication. This approach blends three coordination modes: mechanistic (structured routines), organic (unstructured conversations via phone/Skype), and implicit (shared mental models).

In the Book

Carmel's research across hundreds of distributed organizations found timeshifting "prevalent nearly everywhere" in time-zone-separated workgroups implementing agile practices. The MBTA manager (typically a mid-level liaison) acts as a bridge across cultures and languages—staying up late to conduct critical phone calls, participating in daily standups at both ends of the day, and building the personal relationships and trust that asynchronous email cannot establish. At Microsoft, these liaisons are called "team-room buddies." The arrangement acknowledges that pure "24-hour round-the-clock development" claiming to exploit time zones is rarely feasible, yet some temporal coordination is unavoidable for agile's emphasis on frequent, informal, synchronous communication. MBTA allows managers to have intimate Skype conversations, examine work products jointly, and "just share a joke"—elements critical to distributed agile's people-centric values—while explicitly recognizing the personal hardship this places on liaison individuals.

Why It Matters

MBTA inverts the common assumption that distributed agile requires everyone to adapt equally. Instead, it makes a deliberate organizational choice: accept that timezone overlap is essential to agile teamwork, and burden the hierarchy (not individual contributors) with the temporal cost. This reframes the cost of distribution from "everyone adjusts to a common time" to "organizational design is responsible for creating meaningful overlap." The concept reveals that distributed agile requires not just technology and process, but institutional structures that enable human connection across temporal distance. It also surfaces a hidden organizational tension: agile's distributed adoption may depend on willing sacrifice from key coordinators, a cost that must be visible and managed, not hidden.