Probably the largest remote Big Room Planning in the world
PI-planning with 1000+ Tele2 employees working remotely from home
Tele2’s first remote Big Room Planning (BRP), with more than 1000 employees participating from home, worked well-beyond our expectations. In only two weeks, we changed our plans for a big physical event, into a remote “BRP@Home” — a fully digital collaboration with participants from all over Sweden.
We share our learnings with you here below, to hopefully inspire you to succeed with your own big and remote planning sessions.
About Tele2
Tele2’s vision is to be the smartest telco in the world, creating a society of unlimited possibilities. Ever since Tele2 was founded in 1993, we have continued to challenge prevailing norms and dusty monopolies. Today, our award-winning networks enable mobile and fixed connectivity, telephony, data network services, TV, streaming, and global Internet of Things (“IoT”) solutions for millions of customers.
The Tele2 Big Room Planning sessions
In Sweden, Tele2 conducts BRP sessions several times a year. The concept is basically a cadence-based, face-to-face event that serves as the heartbeat of value delivery at Tele2. It involves employees from most units within Tele2, but from Product, Technology (network), and IT especially.
The goal is to set a clear plan for the next 10 weeks, to get an aligned vision and shared mission and priorities between business, stakeholders, and delivery teams across Tele2. By coming together and prioritizing cross-functionally, we create transparency and collaboration between teams which in turn provides the ability to handle many risks and dependencies already during initial planning.
The Corona challenge
We had a BRP already planned when the corona pandemic lead to Tele2 closing down all offices throughout Sweden. Consequently, we had to figure out how to:
- Enable 1000+ coworkers to do a full BRP remotely over four days
- Make sure that everyone has the information and tools they need in order to fully contribute to the planning
- Prepare everything in only two weeks
Preparations and setup done in only two weeks
Laying the groundwork
To quickly turn around our planning and get things moving as quickly as possible, we adjusted the core team running frequent meetings focused on enabling remote planning. We started by:
- Defining a support structure and the digital tools we would need all purposes — with a clear focus on simplification
- Decided to be open and quickly adjust to learning as we went along
- Agreed to not go into details or specifications and avoid any central control of teams; we wanted to provide an overarching structure, but let teams adjust as necessary
- We established a “Help hotline”, a dedicated channel in Teams
- Crucially, we arranged meetings with key roles (e.g. agile Coaches, Scrum Masters, Release Train Engineers, managers, and Product Owners) and did walkthroughs to prepare them for the exercise
Choice of tools/apps
Within Tele2, we had a number of people with strong knowledge and experience of the different tools for both planning and communication. We used their experience to build a healthy base structure, create training materials, and solve problems as they occurred. This helped us to get people up and running quickly.
We used Microsoft Teams for dialogue and meeting structure. It was our center of communication; video meetings, check-ins, and team chats.
For visual collaboration we implemented virtual boards using Miro, onboarding 800 users in 36 hours.
Finally it should be noted that we used JIRA for documenting the expected work, in the same way that we always do in our physical BRPs.
The event
Given the short time people had to adapt and the minimal time for training, we decided to replicate as much as possible the structure everyone was familiar with since past BRPs.
A dedicated Teams-site, “the BRP Hub”, became the main room in our virtual space, where all important general information, chat rooms, support, etc. could be found. It was also the starting point for anyone joining the exercise. To kick off the planning on Day 1 we broadcasted a short video with a reminder of our purpose and goals and emphasized what value we were planning to bring to our customers.
A master agenda for our four half days with links to different types of virtual meetings for different activities (Broadcast, Live meetings, Breakout sessions, Global meetings) guided our participants on what happened where and in what forum. We had planning intros, breakout sessions, syncs between product owners, confidence votes, and management reviews scheduled.
Our 1000+ participants were already organized into smaller groups of between 80 and 150 people, so-called Value Streams and/or Release trains. To keep the collaborative experience as close to our ordinary physical BRPs as possible, we replicated the multi-room setup we had used before by using Microsoft Teams to group them into breakout rooms. We used channels in Teams to group collaboration around each work unit (feature) planned across teams in the BRP. Every day started with a joint planning session in the respective breakout rooms, facilitators ran through the agenda for that day, and what features were to be planned and in what Teams channel and/or Teams meeting the discussions would take place.
For each business area, we created a master planning board where all the work done by each team was visualized, mapping dependencies, and managing workload across initiatives. We implemented a risk board to support the management review and appointed a dedicated facilitator to all-day support virtual “management by walking around”.
Teams were also given a dedicated team area, with both a planning board and a whiteboard, especially useful when teams needed to plan some work outside their value stream or release train. Most teams adopted the given board while some innovated and came up with new interesting takes on planning their work that we will copy with pride for our next BRP.
We also provided both instruction videos (10 videos for more than 2 hours of training with more than 2000 views in a week) and training material in a channel in Teams. However we knew only a part of the attendees would watch/read all of it. Therefore, we peppered the boards with instructional bubbles, as you can see below in Figure 1. We also recommended facilitators to give a guided tour of the “room” when each planning session started, to ensure everyone knew their way around the tool and where to find everything. This made people feel at home, especially since everyone could see where others were interacting.
For the master plan board, we started from the template provided in Miro and added features that we thought could be useful for all teams.
Every team (Value Stream/ Release Train) was provided with a prepared template board and encouraged to enrich it and make it their own, by adding new elements, team logos, etc. For example, some teams created dedicated collaboration areas for features where they could not only the plan but also set up requirement maps, story maps etc.
The last day of the BRP features “the confidence vote”. It is a BRP tradition and highlighted event, where we give anyone the opportunity to in a psychologically safe way to express reservations about the plan and the need to re-plan or drop some work. For this we tried two different approaches, based on the needs and objectives of each group of teams. One option (bottom right of Figure 1 above) was to do a global simultaneous vote on an entire Master board, which was more like the one we do in physical BRPs.
Another option (Figure 2), for teams where some re-planning likely was needed, was for each team to do their confidence vote individually. This was used to facilitate the plan walkthrough focusing on the lowest confidence votes or most loaded teams. in these cases, the board looked like this
In this board teams summarized the whole plan done in the masterplan across the five sprints. Each sticky color represented their load and the first five was used to do the confidence vote. The lower the confidence vote, the earlier and most broadcast time was given to the team in both the plan walkthrough and management review.
And to do something fun and also socialize, we had virtual after works every day of the BRP, with many employees joining with drinks in their hands. We encouraged everyone to create activities; we had a spontaneous music quiz, DJs, and also a PowerPoint Magic show.
General tips and tricks
Roles: Make sure to specify who will facilitate each session and make sure there is a co-facilitator/moderator as well. It’s hard for participants to get heard when you have large groups so you need to keep chat open but monitored.
Videos: Creating training material and prerecorded instruction videos seem like hard work but it will save you a lot of time once the event is started.
Over prepare: The more time you spend in preparations, the better the outcome from each session will be.
Socializing: Don’t forget to set up social activities besides the dedicated work sessions.
Slack time: Plan some slack time into the agenda. Lunch breaks are important and good to proactively schedule. Be a good example and follow this advice yourselves as well.
Sessions: When planning remotely, book two shorter sessions rather than one long session. It also helps remind you to take breaks and reconvene if people need to go back and discuss with others, then rejoin.
Tools: Find internal or external experts that can facilitate training and troubleshooting both beforehand and live during the event. With 1000+ participants, you will need people dedicated to supporting and troubleshooting nonstop during the complete event.
Plan B: Always have a backup plan when things go wrong. Be prepared. This can include backup facilitators, backup communication channels for any tool performance issues, or prepared schedules with adjustments.
Key learnings
- Planning remotely works!
- Remote planning exercises need more structure and preparation than physical ones to succeed
- Being able to switch between several ongoing online meetings is crucial for collaboration. It is of course as important with a clear agenda and traceability where all discussions are. As such, simple things like the name of the meeting become more important than usual. It must be easy for participants to find their way and toggle between “meeting rooms”
- As always, facilitators may be needed to solve discussions between a widening range of stakeholders. This is likely even more important when working remotely, to secure that everyone gets their voice heard and their opinion considered
- It is of course crucially important with a clear agenda and traceability where all discussions are
- Be patient — you can’t control everything, but everyone is doing their best trying
- We set the Agenda for 4 half days but in the end, a lot of people used 4 full days for BRP-activities — things take longer time remote
Success factors
- An amazing ability to quickly adjust to new circumstances. The built-in challenger spirit is part of our corporate culture, makes everyone eager to solve the problem ahead. These are difficult times; let’s do this together
- Securing a high capacity network and keeping the collaboration off the VPN
- Focus on a limited set of great collaboration tools (MS Teams, Miro and Jira)
- Training videos for the most fundamental tasks, and for different roles
- Facilitation support in every breakout
- Accepting that we couldn’t build the perfect solution. Solving problems on the go, instead of just following a plan
- Teamwork and focus
Written by,
Inger Marshall, Head of Data Driven Excellence
Marika Skytte at Sätra, Head of Lean Agile Center of Excellence
