A team spread across countries and time zones

This branch covers a writing team whose members work in different countries and time zones, and its parts divide by what the spread asks of the team: building the team across countries and working in it, keeping its meetings and deadlines straight across zones, and handing one document from zone to zone so that it moves round the clock. It leaves to its neighbours leading a team spread across regions as one team and holding it together, to leading a team as its manager; setting up and steering a document with several authors, to collaborative writing; reading a multicultural team's behaviour and writing the message that cannot be misread, to communicating across disciplines and cultures; and the international market and the profession country by country, to the medical writing profession beyond one country.

• Working in a team spread across countries — why a department spreads its writers across countries, what a global team gains and finds hard, what working across countries asks of a writer, choosing the communication technology, and running a teleconference
• Scheduling across time zones — reading a zone abbreviation and converting with a tool, daylight saving and planning a meeting, world clocks and where time tools fail, naming the zone of a deadline, and when a colleague can reply and working outside office hours
• Writing a document around the clock across time zones — the working hours gained by handing a document between zones, parallel authoring under continuous quality control, the follow-the-sun relay, the planning, team and lead it needs, its shared workspace and conventions document, its meetings and colour code, a project from kick-off to close-out, and the relay's benefits, challenges and results