Team Collaboration In A Remote Working World
Tools to keep team collaboration as smooth as a greased leopard whilst WFH
I’m Pam and I’m a Producer at REWIND, an immersive experience company. I’m a very visual person when it comes to running projects. I remember when we first moved into the new office I overheard someone mentioning how we were going to get ‘whiteboard walls’. A whole wall?! Well, colour me interested! A dedicated space where we can brainstorm ideas, set out our goals for the sprints, and relay important deadlines for everyone to see — it was the producer’s dream.
Back in March 2020 when the pandemic forced the majority of the world to work from home, it changed everything we knew about working. We had to rethink a lot of our tools. How do you re-create the team working together as one when they are scattered all across the country? How do you keep the conversations and information flowing, exactly like you would if you were all in the same room?
Instant messaging has been great for ad hoc conversations and getting a quick answer to simple questions. However, this is never a good place to keep important information for the teams to refer back to easily in their own time. This led us to question, how could we re-purpose the tools in our production toolbox to aid remote working?
Virtual Whiteboards. A Tool Fit for Purpose.
Since we’ve been WFH, we have been using virtual whiteboards and they have been incredibly useful tools to use throughout the development of a project.
All the projects that we work on require input from a large number of people across different departments (and timezones), so using a collaborative tool is essential in our process to create incredible projects. Miro is a virtual whiteboard that has helped us continue to work effectively as a team whilst all working remotely.
Below are some examples of how we have used Miro.
Story Mapping
My first introduction to Miro and virtual whiteboards was whilst running a story mapping session with the team. A story map represents the journey a user takes with a product, including the tasks and activities they perform with the system. It’s created collaboratively with a team and allows them to understand the functionality in a user-centric way.
A story map can help the team identify risks and omissions or alternative ways of providing the solutions to the user’s needs.
It’s a powerful tool and offers a more holistic view than a flat list of items. They can also get pretty big, so a virtual whiteboard is perfect for allowing the team to go deep into the product and organise and re-organise to their heart’s content.
If you want to dig deeper into what Story Mapping entails, check out Jeff Patton’s site.
High-Level Estimation
At the start of a project, there is a high chance you won’t be able to put together a full breakdown of everything you need but a high-level estimation session is a good place to start.
A producer and department leads come together and talk through each large feature of the project and add high-level estimates of what will be needed to complete it. You may be able to put in pretty accurate forecasts, for example, how many weeks a feature will take, but if there are too many unknowns to the feature you can also use T-Shirt sizes (shown below) as a guide.
An “S” (“Small”) task is low risk and easy to implement. On the other end of the scale, an “XL” (“Extra Large”) task has many unknowns and further investigation is needed to really break down the work. From this, you can get a high-level plan of where all these features fit in with the time and resources that you have available. The beauty of using digital whiteboards is that your team can do this offline and then come together and discuss their thoughts on each feature.
Milestone Confidence Levels
It’s hard to be put on the spot and be asked how you feel about a certain piece of information that was given to you less than 60 seconds ago. One session I ran with a team was a Milestone Confidence Level exercise, which we held on Miro.
In this exercise, I wrote out all the deliverables for each milestone and went through them with the team. Each team member went away to think about what these deliverables actually meant for them. During this time, they put a coloured dot against each deliverable from Green (confident) Orange (semi-confident) and red (not confident) and we regrouped the next day to discuss them. From this, we also pulled out our risks and dependencies together as a team.
The three examples above are just a small handful of what you can do with virtual whiteboards and how useful a tool they are in a world where teams work remotely.
Retrospectives
At REWIND, we have retrospectives at the end of each sprint. As part of our Agile practice we believe in inspecting and adapting. Retrospectives are a great way of looking back at the project and assessing it.
Virtual whiteboards are set up ahead of time so team members attending the retrospective can think about what went well during the sprint, what needs improvement, and the next steps.
What this brings to the virtual table is a team discussion, a place where we can give shout outs to our colleagues who helped us out during the sprint, and to work together to improve our processes for future projects.
Large Scale Planning
When you start a large project, information can be spread across several different platforms and small details can easily be missed. What this board below shows is how even large scale project planning can all be done in one board. It tells a story: from the story mapping phase of the high-level features and user stories, to the breakdown of tasks that bring our sprint goals and user stories to life.
Teams can place their own post-its and move features around as the conversations are happening in real-time. Within this whole board, you can see the plan of not just the now but what is to come and, most importantly, it’s all in one place for the team to refer back to in their own time.
Storyboards
Similar to large scale project planning, storyboards can have a lot of moving parts from scripts to concepts and feedback notes. Within virtual whiteboards, you can keep all that information in one place. Most importantly, it keeps everybody on the same page so everyone has sight of what the final project will be.
So Much Room for Activities!
Like with anything within a physical space you will eventually run out of something, whether it’s whiteboard space, post-it notes, or the fact that someone has “borrowed” your favourite whiteboard marker. With virtual whiteboards, you don’t have to worry about running out of anything. It’s the ultimate sandbox.
Not only do you have a large space to play with, but not being able to read someone else’s (or your own!) illegible handwriting is a thing of the past. No longer do you need to decrypt the chicken scrawl you wrote on a post-it note two days ago with a feature list longer than a Leonard Cohen song!
Things Will Only Get Better.
Once the world starts to settle down, there will be a place for physical whiteboards again. I have to admit, I do miss the presence of people jumping up from their seats and contributing to sessions/workshops with physical items. But for now, I think I can safely say I have been converted from whiteboard walls and fancy tricks with post-it notes.
Miro has been adding in a bunch of new features since many of us went to work remotely. For example, you can now video chat within boards, which means you no longer need to use a third-party video call for your meetings. It also lets you set a timer with some jazzy music for your team to discuss certain parts of workshops within a set time.
Miro isn’t the only company that is adding features to help us work remotely, Google has also added a whiteboard section, raising hand feature and breakout rooms to its Google Meet platform.
I am looking forward to seeing how technology and software will develop and change as we enter the next phase of work.
XRLO: eXtended Reality Lowdown is brought to you by REWIND, an immersive design and innovation company. If you want to talk tech, ideas, and the future, get in touch here.
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