Program Management for Humans
How Loup keeps the pack aligned
This post written by Erika D., Loup’s Program Director
As a fully distributed team with plenty of projects on the go, Loup stays organized with a cherry-picked selection of Agile practices. For a smaller team, adopting the full set of methodologies within the Agile framework can feel bloated, time consuming, and unpleasantly bureaucratic. Focusing on just a few practices keeps us organized, limits the software we must learn, rely on, and pay for, and keeps our spirits intact as we contend with the work ahead of us. It has never felt quite right to call this Agile, so we call it “Program Management for Humans”.
Here’s our hit list for collaborating smartly to get things done…
Plan work in heartbeats
We plan our work in manageable chunks of time, usually one week long. Lots of teams call these Sprints, but the idea of sprinting week after week is, frankly, rather exhausting. We prefer the steady rhythm of a heartbeat, and reserve sprinting for one or two day ultra-focused project sessions.
Kick off each week
Each heartbeat begins with a kickoff, where we meet to review progress from the previous week, identify upcoming priorities, and assign tasks. At Loup, these are long meetings — usually we need a snack break! Rather than rushing, we allow time to talk through vexing problems, new ideas, project blockers, and biz dev opportunities. A 10-minute conversation in the kickoff meeting almost always saves us booking multiple 30-minute call later in the week.
Issue tracking
The key to our kickoffs is a single place to track what we’re working on: our single source of truth. Many tools exist for this purpose, and we’ve previously relied on Trello. We decided to switch to Airtable to better integrate our client data and pipeline. As a small shop, we don’t want — or need — a separate CRM. Airtable, though somewhat overwhelming at first, has replaced purchasing multiple accounts on different tools.
Casual chatting and updates
Most organizations use a platform for daily, internal chatter. We use Slack and it works especially well for passing the baton back and forth on collaborative projects that we’re all working on asynchronously. Plus, one can never under-estimate the value of exchanging emojis to combat the isolation factor on distributed teams.
Virtual coworking
Once or twice a week, a pair of us will block out a chunk of time to cowork on a specific project. This time is semi-structured: we start with a quick agreement on what we hope to achieve (an important step as it helps us know when to end the session!) and the process for how we’ll do it (usually some combination of research, emailing external folks, graphic design, writing, and editing).
To an outside observer, these sessions might look a little odd: two people on a video call not speaking much. But we’ve found that dedicating time to loosely collaborate on a shared goal is much more productive than working independently throughout the week. Often we can make huge advances on a project in just one or two hours by hanging out on a call and resolving a series of little blockers.
Facilitate. All. Meetings.
Here is a lesson we’ve learned the hard way: on small teams, it’s tempting to throw some time on the calendar to kick off a discussion on a big idea or initiative that has consequences across the org. Because the idea is new and touches so many areas, often there’s no owner or leader driving the initial discussions. Occasionally this works, but other times it fails spectacularly, resulting in a confused discussion, a lack of understanding, and frustration.
Now, we identify a facilitator for every discussion. Their job is to create a loose agenda that the rest of us agree to respect, and keep us aware of the time ( when no one’s in charge, meetings tend to drag on well past the point of productivity). We rotate the facilitator, and they participate fully in the conversation, so it doesn’t feel like a burden or a missed opportunity to be tasked with the job.
Working openly and collaboratively
Through previous experience, we’ve learned that trying to weigh in on a nearly-finished document can be fraught. At Loup, we share early and often: virtually all our work is done in collaborative documents, like a Google Doc or an etherpad. We share very rough first drafts: bullet points, half-formed sentences, punctuation-free blocks of text (charmingly referred to as ‘finger-puking’). And we directly edit each other’s work, since comments and “suggestion mode” can sometimes feel passive-aggressive over multiple drafts.
This takes a phenomenal amount of trust: trust that our teammates won’t judge our half-formed thoughts; trust that they won’t ridicule our poor spelling and grammar; trust that if the document makes a radical change of direction, it will still turn out OK; trust that the process works, and that the final product will be high-quality.
Regular, scheduled retrospectives
Every two weeks, without fail, we meet to review what went well and what didn’t since the last time we met. This is a time to acknowledge failures and struggles without judgement or blame, and to celebrate what did work — even the little things.
Recently we’ve tweaked this process to call out and celebrate adaptations — moments where we changed the plan or the tool or the approach to resolve a blocker, get a task done more easily, or produce higher-quality work. We end the retro with a list of to-dos, which we weave into the following heartbeat.
We committed to holding a retro every second week, even if half the team is away. It’s amazing how many observations, learnings, and suggestions for iterating that even two people can surface.
Long-term planning with OKRs
Heartbeats, weekly kickoffs, and retrospectives help projects run smoothly in the short term, but what about long-term planning? We address this with OKRs — objectives and key results — which we review quickly during each kickoff, and in-depth once a quarter.
Like any tool, OKRs can be misused — especially in large organizational settings — and there was some serious antipathy on the team about adopting them for our work. But it turns out that OKRs for a small, flexible team work pretty well. We use them as a beacon and a guide, but we don’t stress about them too much. Most importantly: if they stop making sense, we adjust them.
Long-term planning with OKRs enables us to grow the operational capacity of our organization over time. It’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day or week-to-week flow of tasks and projects, but having a few lofty goals just over the horizon motivates us to keep the bigger picture in mind. (See Loup’s OKRs — includes a template you can copy and use!)
Social-emotional connections
Remote work is isolating. Even though we have full lives away from our desks, anyone working on a distributed team is still spending a good portion of their day alone in front of a screen. We know that connections build trust, so we allow room for, and even build in time for personal banter and sharing before and after meetings. “How was your weekend?” isn’t answered with a simple “Ok” at Loup, but instead is an invitation to take the time to share a hilarious anecdote, an update on the garden, or a movie or podcast review.
Empathy builds connections, and we are deliberate in listening to each other share details from our lives. That being said, we also accept when someone politely logs off rather than sit through a Game of Thrones recap.
Using Mural to break away from text
The Loup team is well-versed in the sticky-note and whiteboard style of in-person collaboration and we struggled with how to replicate this on a distributed team. GSuite tools are too text-based for our liking and, while we had hopes for Retrium, we ultimately found it too rigid.
Then we discovered Mural. This collaborative tool allows us to approximate the face-to-face modality we love (stickies and whiteboarding) and to work creatively and independently at the same time. Our Mural sessions, held during a video chat, have evolved their own natural flow: we start by silently contributing text and doodles, then we collectively organize our individual ideas into themes, and finally we discuss and build on our notes.
We’ve found this is a great way to facilitate groups remotely, especially for creative activities like design sprints. For a distributed team, this tool has been a game-changer by breaking us away from boring old text and breathing life and fun into our virtual collaborations.
Interested in bringing these techniques to your team?
Loup offers custom organizational design and guidance with a specialization in helping geographically distributed teams, communities, and network-building projects. Through training, coaching, tooling, and facilitation, we help establish healthy project management processes and practices for teams. Learn more about our services.
