Last week, 120 of us met up online to scope out the work and the objectives for the next three months. In scaled agile (SAFe) this is called Programme Increment Planning (or PI Planning). We didn’t do it ‘by the book’ but we took parts of the concept and adapted it to our needs and to our current level of agility. I won’t go into detail about PI planning, I’ll just talk about the tools we used for our communication and collaborative working space. I’ll also mention the etiquette that helped keep the conversation flowing. I hope that this is of interest to anyone else organising a large online event.
Due to the current circumstances, this meeting obviously needed to be conducted online and it’s likely that the next will be online too. Hopefully our next event will see some improvements.
The agenda included presentations, break off meetings, working sessions and dependency meetings. We were spread over five locations / time zones: Cambridge, New York, Madrid, Delhi, Manila (and maybe some other exotic locations that we were unaware of).
The work we needed to scope out included planning the design and development work for our platform, CambridgeOne.org and tracking all the risks and dependencies between the six scrum teams,
At the end of the three days we wanted to be able to get the ‘buy in’ from other teams to start our work.
Preparation
- We started planning the event by forming a cross disciplinary team to make sure all needs were met.
- This was done mainly over text chat and worked quite well because any initial ideas were bounced around before committing to them.
Communicating with Microsoft Teams
Set up
- We created a new ‘Team’ just for this event (e.g. “2020 Q2 PI Planning”). It keeps everything separate from any other existing teams (e.g. our “Cambridge One” team) and is good for member management.
- It might be handy to reuse this for future events.
Presentations
- Presentations work well with screen sharing and the chat window open for people to ask questions or make comments. It’s also easy for someone to present and then to hand over to someone else who can share their screen or continue.
- Which screen to share can be tricky in MS Teams.
Break off rooms
- This is one of the most important parts of the event and something that Skype cannot do.
- Break off rooms need to be organised in advance in Teams by creating ‘channels’ within the Team. The channels can either be open or private and is essentially a dedicated area for people to text chat, share files or start a video call.
- Meetings can also be booked in advance from within a channel and this will appear in your Outlook calendar
- At one point 11 meeting rooms running simultaneously.
Chat window
- Our etiquette (below) was to request members have the chat window open as default. This worked well and there was a good amount of chat and Q&A taking place throughout the presentations.
- MS Teams did however start struggling when we all started congratulating each other with GIFs. In a mad frenzy suddenly hundreds of gifs of Napoleon Dynamite, Jackie Collins and other freaks started clogging up the RAM.
Confidence voting
After listening to a team present their objectives, scope, risks and dependencies, everyone else has the chance to vote on their confidence (out of five) on the plans.
- We used an MS Teams tool called ‘Polly’ but the experience was dire (avoid) – people had to leave to meeting room and go to to vote and then come back. We need a better solution to the this in the future.
- I suspect some people avoided raising their concerns in front of many people so I think there needs to be an alternative channel to raise concerns (which should be subsequently tracked as risks).
Chill out room
Since this was going to be a demanding event, the idea was to have a room where people could go to chill out, chat and listen to music.
- In order to stream our CUP Funtimes playlist, I needed to install Audio Hijack and Loopback on my Mac. It has taken me hours to figure this out but absolutely essential because I want to integrate music into the Show and tells.
- In the end, it wasn’t actually used very much for meeting up but I did notice some people logging in and simply listening to the music whilst they worked as if it were a radio. In future it would be a better option to just have our very own ‘radio’.
Conclusion on MS Teams
If you are already using Outlook and 365, then Teams is an excellent choice to create calendar invites and break off rooms. The invitations are particularly important for us because we had at least five different time zones and Outlook syncs the time zones automatically. My only recommendation would be to request people to go easy on the Naploean Dynamite gifs in the chat window.
Online collaboration with Miro
I still cannot believe how good a tool Miro is. (Miro.com)
Collaborative whiteboards
Under normal circumstances, our team would be gathered in a huddle, talking about the work we need to do, scoping it out and sticking post-its on the wall. Each post-it would represent a piece of work. Since we work in two-week sprints and we roughly know our velocity (how much we can typically complete in a two week sprint), we can estimate what we could aim to achieve in the first sprint, then the next and so on. We can then step back, look at the big picture, and review at any dependencies and move stuff around etc. We can also walk over to other teams to see if any of their work impacts us. We can do all of this virtually with Miro. A phenomenal tool.
Most of us have Miro licences but even guests can now edit. (Thank you Miro).
Layout
- The layout of our Miro boards is a big information radiator. We visualise all of our work on Miro and link it up to Jira tickets which we track in our scrum boards. In a sort-of dual-track-agile manner we have UX working ahead of development. We’ve been working on our own style of sprint layouts for a few quarters and oh-boy-what-a-difference-a-good-designer-makes!
The layout is just beautiful (designed by our service designer Hannah Todd) and has everything we need:
- columns for objectives, risks, dependencies, parking lot, etc,
- the sprints arranged into swim lanes for UX testing and tech research, UX work and Dev work.
- UX prioritisation matrices (user value vs organisational effort) to seek any quick wins or identify low-value/high-effort for the bin (more info from the NN Group) but we need to set up the boards earlier to make the best use of these.
- a space for retrospection and feedback.
Codifying our post-its and objectives
To avoid a post-it that simply says ‘code update’ (as we have had in the past) it was important for us to codify a shared expectation of the information on the post-its, mainly so that anybody else looking at our work can see what we are working on in case the work impacts them.
It’s also important that they know why we are working on something so that it all links up to our objectives (ah, the objectives). How to write good PI Objectives.
Conclusions on Miro
Miro is a superb tool and I think we wouldn’t have been able to achieve as much as we did without the tool. Miro also has other handy features such as a timer for timeboxing, voting tools and a presentation mode for presenting your boards. The affordance that Miro brings is spectacular.
A good (free) alternative is Google Drawings but the experience is simply not as seamless, fast or intuitive for guests.
Highly recommend Miro for any event that requires collaborative brainstorming or planning.
Etiquette
The main aim of the etiquette is to keep the conversation flowing in an online discussion. Conversation can be easily strained when there is a connection lag and we cannot rely on body language for cues.
Added to that, in recent weeks, we’ve had a wide variety of background noises: kids screaming, dogs farting, delivery men and even Ceebeebies ‘Care Bears’ playing in the background. Hence the etiquette:
- Mute mic when not speaking to reduce bandwidth and improve sound quality
- Use the ELMO system (Enough Let’s Move On) when we are getting off topic. Everybody has the right to request this at any time and it will be respected. The topic will be moved to the parking lot on the Miro board so that we can continue the conversation later if requested.
- Webcams off for big groups to reduce bandwidth – webcams on for small groups.
- Disable any notifications or tones (via settings)
- Tell the facilitator if you need a back channel to clarify any language concerns or if you haven’t understood something
- Chat window always visible for questions and answers
- Tag people (e.g. @Joe Bloggs) if you want to get their direct attention in the chat
To keep the flow during conversations, sometimes it is more convenient to write a quick message in the chat window rather than speaking and interrupting someone mid-sentence, such as:
- I agree / 👍
- I disagree / 👎
- Enough let’s move on / ELMO
- You’re breaking up
- You are on mute
- Can you mute your mic?
- Something urgent has come up / 🚴
Many of these ideas come from Lisette Sutherland’s book ‘Work together anywhere‘. She has ‘calling cards’ for many of these but we had webcams off.
Many seemed to like the idea of ELMO but it hasn’t yet become second nature. This might take some time.
In terms of facilitation:
- Reminder email sent out beforehand with agenda, etiquette and technical checlist
- Roles shared for facilitators, tech helpers and time keepers
- Time boxing presentations
- Facilitators arriving early for warm up games
Overall conclusions
Instinctively our objective was to make this as effective as a face-to-face PI Planning but I think we could’ve made this more measurable. I like Hannah’s approach: she wanted to take a service design approach which was to make this the best planning experience ever and that was evident in the design of the boards and the organisation of our Teams channels.
Somewhat predictably, a lot of the success of this event – or any online event – came down to the preparation / set up of the tools and clarity of our working space. We are also at a stage where we now have the technology to do such intricate and collaborative work online collaboratively. After that, the conversation could flow and the shared etiquette helped to contain the conversation and keep it moving in the right direction (towards our objectives).
We were able to plan the next three month’s of work and in a relatively efficient time span without any technical hiccups. The feedback so far suggests that it went well but one thing that people missed was the social aspect (and the beers!). I’m sure we can work on that out for next time …
Recommended reading
Work together anywhere by Lisette Sutherland. A goldmine of tips for remote working and events.