Let’s start with the 3NOs first. I am on the opinion that proper as-is situation diagnose is a key to develop the to-be response.
- No travel
Depending the perspective (and execution) travel can be considered as a pure cost or the project investment (apart of the accounting/financial interpretations). This is even more sensitive area depending who’s asked, but again the healthy business outlook on any of the project – is to consider this as the investment which eventually should pay back (or mitigate the risk, or adhere to the law, etc.). So any project expense, decision or granular activity of execution is kind of the investment to have the project accomplished. And as any investment can be a good one or a poor one, also has to be managed over the time.
I am coming from the old school: no investment, no return. No travel, no direct outcomes of the travel. What’s been the ‘good’ travel outcomes:
- team buildings (read: reduce the time of relationship setup to move the team from the storming to performing)
- real brainstorming (read: set of people with the pen, blackboard, notes and discussion around this)
- deliverables and direction (read: travel had a reason to produce a deliverable and sustain the direction for the project or any of its work-stream).
What remote project management methods would be to achieve similar (don’t want to say same) results in the new normal?
- team building: remote over conferencing virtual sessions. Still having the same principles (especially as PM / host of the meeting): proper dressing, proper introduction (business card exchange not possible, but virtual wave or handshake probably yes), proper behavior (professional conduct) and then do the real team building. What’s the ‘real’ effective team building? Short answer would to be to get a random team from the point A do B in the possible shortest time with possible less turbulence. To set the context: point A is the Team Forming and point B is the Team Performing followed the classical pattern (Forming, Storming, Norming, Performing).
Hold on. Isn’t storming and norming most interesting or challenging in this exercise? Yes, it is. And this is one of the nuances of virtual team management which is frequently under-invested or even not recognized by the managers and their reporting structure. Effective team building is a project overhead and high performance isn’t given upfront. It’s a methodical and systematic effort to build, engage and sustain a winning team. I will come back to this in one of the next posts. Remote team building isn’t that much different than having this onsite – but assuming 70-90% of messaging considered as non-verbal space, video and voice is a minimal successful way of this exercise (i will continue to say ’emails barely work’). - virtual brainstorming: not that much different than onsite, as long you you’re lucky to absorb the habits from the Agile manifesto and community or you’ve been simply a part of the agile (preferably software) teams at some point of your carrier. Why? Extreme Programming concepts, with pair coding (read: writing piece of document like project charter or testing strategy) or guided brainstorming sessions with basic tools like the notepad, paint and (worst case) spreadsheet or the presentation worked with the team or at minimum 1 more reviewed on the fly is the best winning method in this case. Again, habit is very simple: meeting starts, notepad gets opened, notes get there: structure of the content, deliverable to be produced, ideas and actions. Afterwards a basic sharing option (any sharepoint or teamwork platform) and actions taken makes this even more successful. Cherry on a cake is a brief minutes of the meeting with few bullet point what’s been discussed, agreed and who’s on action. Execution and follow ups is something which differentiates successful project from unsuccessful (read: successful PMs from unsuccessful). I will come back to the execution also in on of the following posts.
- deliverables and direction: also not that much different than onsite, as long as as you and your team have developed a strong ‘deliverable-oriented’ culture of work. Leadership is a key in this situation, personal and professional to lead the diverse and dispersed team to the single set of objectives in a finite period of time. What remote techniques help to get there? A good sense and hands on of the accountability, regular presence again on video and regular checkpoints overt the long path of deliverable. Some of the typical tools are more useful than ever: Action Trackers and other RAID logs, Project Planning and Visual Dependency Management tools, RACI matrix, Resource Assignment Matrix (RAM) and any kind of supporting deliverables listings. We will come back to this as well.
2. No colocation
Why this is different than ‘no travel’? Very simple. It isn’t just a PM, lead functional architect or change manger not able to travel at the moment. It’s almost everybody working isolated – so whole teams scattered and relocated to their home office like the set of individuals. What’s the difference? The real difference is just removed ‘team collocation’ asset, to have any financial, purchasing or logistic group of experts no fully isolated from each other. What’s the loss? They can’t exchange the feedback on the fly – as the preparation to any of the project meeting, during the meeting and after workshops are over in the same way as they’ve been able to exchange in the past.
Remedy: virtual coffees, chatting etc? Too easy and too principal probably. The response to lack of collocation has to be much more methodical, structure and embedded into team and organization culture. Before developing one, at minimum it’s good to realize by team members and management – it’s now way different than it used to be, and there has to be (read: there is) a natural productivity and engagement drop in the team performance. Science behind this? For now just consider this as a thesis and observation. It can be somehow contrary with the other opinions, but i am getting prepared to defend it as well.
The Best defense is to assume above as true and get ourselves and team prepared to respond for ‘no-collocation’ challenge. What would be the response? Let me think about that, it won’t be anything cutting edge different than virtual hotlines or meetings, frequency of interactions and so on.
In my remote project simply the best working pattern is an agile principle of the Daily Standup Meetings? What those are and how to execute. We will come back to this, but for now consider this as a fairly brief (30-45 min max) meeting with no hierarchy (peers in there) to discsuss ongoing topics / issues and get them prioritized to resolve outside of the meeting. That’s the ‘hard’ deliverable of the meeting if managed well. ‘Soft’ is even more powerful, as this is a daily smaller or wider team interaction ‘what’s going on’ – so a simple communication layer. This drives engagement up and indentity to the project team and objectives.
3. No transition
So welcome to the new world. Everyone’s been sent to the home office and now new normal requires as to adapt over the night to the new circumstances. At least this is a ground assumption and i am not saying that (some) organization have been not providing a full transition periods, trainings the real framework how to work remotely in their projects and other areas. However, assuming for majority of them this wasn’t very much a case (from my little research) – here we’re dealing with the situation to have the same scope, same timeline and same project objectives with way different team setup, ways of working and all implications (read: productivity drop and losses). Form the elementary science laws, this can’t work with no impact to any of the schedule, timeline or the budgets. It it doesn’t.
What’s the response? On the fly risk mitigation, developing remote ways of working while delivering the project. Is this doable? Yes it is, but requires a strong knowledge and dedication from all of the sponsors and the team. How to make it happen? We’ll get there, but the opening statement is to have this fact simply outline by the management and within a team – hey – we have now a different situation. We recognize this and we’re here together to get thought this even stronger. The worst scenarios? Acting like nothing has happened and this is business as usual. This is a simple method for engagement drop, increase in the working hours and long term burn outs for the team who’s at their own with the new circumstances.
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