Category: remote

WFH+365

It’s been a year since we were told we had to work from home, thanks to COVID-19. WFH has always been an option for us, and it can be useful for the odd day or maybe two, but a year of it is way too much if you ask me! (I do appreciate that I’m fortunate to still be working and that my company has been very helpful in making WFH sustainable, but I miss the face to face chats even more than I miss the free snacks!)

Let’s go back to March 2020 and start at the beginning. COVID was hitting the news and there was talk of us doing a few days “test” to see if our various systems could handle hundreds of people working remotely. I remember that was announced on Wednesday, and so my coaching team decided to do a pre-test on the Friday… but before we could start the test it became the real thing, and we’ve been working from home ever since.

Why do I mention this on my agile blog? Because there’s lots to learn from it: agility is the ability to react and change rapidly; working from home requires a lot of adaptation; and of course “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley” or, if you’re not fluent in Robert Burns, no matter how good your plan is something will go wrong 🙂

If we didn’t already have some degree of agility throughout the company then some parts would probably have broken or at least been very taxed to cope with the sudden changes. Our IT teams quickly dealt with issues as they were reported, but then most IT teams are used to reacting to waves of tickets – kanban (or more often some process based on aspects of kanban) supports the flexibility and unpredictability that they face. Dev teams were empowered to experiment and find tools that worked for them; for example, we had a preferred video conferencing tool but teams are used to chatting with the people around them, so some used Discord and others tried Sococo – the emphasis was to focus on the outcomes (e.g. ad hoc conversations).

One adaptation that I had to make was due to the lack of (or at least greatly reduced) visual cues that I observe when sitting in a room with the people that I’m coaching. Combine that with physical interruptions, internet connections that drop every third syllable, the increased possibility of multi-tasking (e.g. having a conversation on Slack in another window) and general fatigue, and unsurprisingly it’s a challenge to have deep conversations. Shorter, more focused discussions followed up by text chats seem to be working, but it does seem to mean slower progress… but at least it’s progress!

I also find that I am using whiteboards even more than I did BC (Before Covid) and after trying a few websites Mural.co is a firm favourite – it’s simple enough that anyone can contribute with a moment’s introduction, but powerful enough that we can build templates for a variety of purposes (retrospectives, story mapping, roadmaps, popcorn improvement boards, etc.).

What adapting to COVID restrictions has shown me is that flexibility, empowerment, experiments, and adaptation are key – now if only we had a word to encapsulate all that. 😉

The new norm

Everyone seems to have posted their tips/tricks/techniques/tools for the new norm with dev teams working from home, so I’m probably not going to post anything groundbreaking (wow, way to convince people to read this post!) but simply what we currently find works for us – it’s just some hands-on experience which might be helpful.

We still have access to our regular tools for kanban boards, wiki (lightweight docs), code repositories, etc. but there are some things which we are just used to doing face-to-face, with sticky notes and whiteboards so these were the tools for which we needed to find alternatives.

Firstly, it was important to let the teams find what works for them – there’s no point in telling everyone to use a particular tool if it doesn’t meet their needs, and who knows better than the teams themselves. Even though we use BlueJeans for video chats and Slack has built-in video calling, when asked how they’ll stay in touch throughout the day they picked Discord – they’re familiar with it (as gamers) and it’s proven to be stable under heavy load.

For retrospectives, we tried a variety of tools; Retrium works well but has a limited set of formats; for more freedom we picked Mural (i.e. it’s just whiteboard) although Google Jamboard or BlueJeans’ built-in whiteboard are great for impromptu discussions as they don’t require us to send out invitations. (Note that when the BlueJeans call ends it just wipes the whiteboard so remember to grab a screenshot!)

One feature we like with large groups is BlueJeans’ facility to set up breakout rooms; using that in conjunction with 1-2-4-All from Liberating Structures.

Obviously, we need to make sure not to put anything confidential or sensitive on these public tools but for ephemeral discussions, they seem to do what we need… at least until we find a newer, shinier alternative 🙂 so what are you finding works well?

Update: The addition of Snap Camera has made video calls more entertaining – it’s owned by SnapChat but it can be used with BlueJeans.