How to spin up a digital project during lockdown: challenges, tips and tools

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Jack: Alright, I think that’s enough time for us to get started. Lovely. Well I’d first like to begin by saying a massive thank you all for coming today. Welcome to our very first Made Tech talks webinar: “How to spin up a digital project during lockdown -Challenges, tips and tools”. Our speakers today are Andreas England, our very own Head of Product here at Made Tech, and  Clare Sudbery, one of our Lead Engineers.

Before I hand over, just a brief explanation of how this is gonna go today: We’re going to open with a 45-minute discussion between Clare and Andreas, before moving on to a 15-minute Q&A at the end to round off. This session will be being recorded, and we encourage you please to use the Q&A function found at the bottom of your screen to ask any questions you might have, that we’ll try our very best to answer for the end of the webinar. Also we have provided subtitles and captions. Instructions to get those are in the chat function that you’ll find also at the bottom of your screen, or on the right, depending on what you’re using.

And without much further ado, I think I’ll hand over to Clare and Andreas.

Clare: Thanks Jack.

Andreas: Thank you Jack.

As just said, I’m Andreas I’m the Head of Product at Made Tech, and I’d like to introduce Clare who is – let me find your formal job title on my board of many things – Clare is the Lead Engineer at Made Tech of this project.

Clare: Thanks Andreas.

Andreas: Great. So, once again, let’s remind of what the title for this project is. So we are starting the “Skills for Care” project – which we’ll explain what the Skills for Care project is – during lockdown. And to set the timeframe this all began on Friday the 13th of March is the key date. We’re going to talk about the mild panic that we had, there’s a certain time frame there, then the project itself, what we’ve learned, the things that we found that worked really well, and in typical retrospective style the things that didn’t go so well, and the changes we’d make. And we’re aware that we’re broadcasting for 45 minutes, so we’ll recap and keep reinforcing the areas that we feel really drove value during this project. So I’ve spoken too much already, Clare, as I always do! Would you like to introduce the project for us?

Clare: Yeah, so let’s talk a bit… so what we’re going to be talking about is a two-week period that happened in March, right at the very beginning of lockdown, where we were running what we call an ‘inception’ on behalf of our client, who are “Skills for Care” in Leeds. What an inception is, is when we’re starting a new project and we’re trying to get everything set up for success. So in our case we were taking over a website from a previous supplier, so we were going to be developing that website on behalf of Skills for Care. In fact we are developing that website on behalf of Skills for Care. We were brand new, it was a new relationship between Made Tech – the consultancy – and Skills for Care, and we needed to get to know each other, we needed to understand the product, we needed to understand the challenges. Very crucially for us, we needed to understand the user needs. And we wanted to have a focus period at the beginning of the project – which is what we call ‘inception’ – in order to get all our ducks in a row, set ourselves up for success, and also establish good relationships. And we would normally do that in a room. So we would normally set things up so that we can spend two weeks all in the same room together, running workshops and building relationships, and at the very last minute we realised we weren’t going to do that in the same physical space.

Friday 13th of March was actually… the following week was not the first week of official lockdown. Lockdown officially – you know as sanctioned by the government – started the week after that, but we saw it coming, and we realised that it was very likely that it was going to happen, and that it might happen in the middle of our inception, in the second week of what we what was a two-week planned set of workshops. And so, we decided that we weren’t happy that, apart from anything else, all of the people involved were going to be traveling from all over the country, and we weren’t happy with the idea that they were going to be on trains and on public transport potentially spreading COVID, and then that we were all going to be physically in the same room as each other again, potentially spreading germs. This did not feel like a responsible thing to do, so we decided we were going to run it remotely.

And just very quickly to talk about who we are: Made Tech. So, we are Made Tech, we are an IT consultancy. On this project, we are partnering with Different, who are an agency who specialises in user research and user design, and on this project what we’re doing is we are developing a website on behalf of our client, Skills for Care, in partnership with Different. And as a consultancy, this is typically what we do, we develop software on behalf of our clients. And we don’t just develop software on their behalf; we help them to learn how to do good software development. So, in this case we also have a client developer who is working alongside us and is also helping us to develop this website, and if we’re able to share good practice along the way, that is also very much something that that we aim to do.

Andreas: So you’ve just said something – and in all our dry runs we didn’t discuss this, and I feel we have to now – in that you mentioned that we could have possibly done a week on site and then gone remote for a week, and we unanimously decided that fully remote was the way to go. Number one, the simple fear of lockdown. What was it? It was a pandemic, and therefore we all hid! But the other factor –  what do you feel about the fact that if we had been able to do some work on site and then go remote? I know I’m asking you to postulate about something that didn’t happen, but that’s interesting.

Clare: We talked about it, yeah, and if there hadn’t been a pandemic in place, that would have been my preference. And actually, I would always recommend to people, if you’re going to have a fully remote team, start by meeting each other in person. But when there’s a global pandemic and meeting each other in person potentially involves making people ill and possibly even causing somebody’s death, suddenly that becomes less advisable.

Andreas: Agreed! Okay um I’m going to move on now to – Fundamentally, what were we trying to achieve within the session. We’ve talked about inception, which, we are inherently a Lean/Agile project company, that’s our favorite way of working. I will not delve into Lean and Agile, but to simply say that working in the smallest chunks possible to begin to achieve value as quickly as possible. I think that’s my elevator pitch for Agile and Lean. But the problem with Agile is it’s difficult to spin the project up because you need to be high-performing instantly. And inception is the methodology of compressing – I want to say compressing everybody together – but compressing all of the domain experts, all of their knowledge, getting that to be shared amongst the group, getting an agreed understanding of what we’re doing in a really strong direction of travel, and enabling them to then just start working in the Agile sprints – sprints being the time-frame within which we deliver value – and to get going. So there’s my inception elevator pitch. What else we were trying to achieve, Clare?

Clare: So yeah, we want to get going quickly, we want to build good relationships, we want to understand the problem domain, we want to understand the user needs, and we also needed to perform a handover in our case, because we were taking over from another supplier. Now these people have already been working on this project for several months, and they have all the domain knowledge, they know the codebase. And so we simultaneously – and this isn’t always the case, sometimes you’re starting from scratch – in this case we weren’t. So as well as wanting to run a lot of workshops with the people that we are going to be working with, moving forwards, and develop good relationships, and decide on ways of working simultaneously; we’re also doing a handover with the previous supplier, who aren’t going to be involved in these workshops because it’s not actually relevant to them what we do going forward. But we still need to talk to them, we need to spend time with them, and that was a challenge. And what we decided to do was that, because ideally we would want everybody involved in these workshops, and that includes all the developers in this case, what we had to do was cycle the developers in and out of the workshops so that developers could spend time with the previous supplier, get to know the codebase, get to know all the various different procedures and do a technical handover, and because of timing we didn’t feel that we wanted to lose two weeks. We could have just spent two weeks doing the handover and then done the inception, but we didn’t want to lose that time. We had people fired up and ready to go, particularly the user research experts and all the design expertise from different… and we wanted to build those relationships and get to know our client as soon as possible. So we did run them in tandem.

Do you want to talk a bit about your previous experience in particular, Andreas? So we’ll just have a brief section talking about our experience. I will talk about mine and then I’ll hand over to Andreas. We had both worked remotely before. I had actually just come off a project where I’d spent 12 months working with people in Dublin and San Francisco and New York simultaneously, and we were fully remote, so I was used to that as a way of working. I wasn’t used to running workshops remotely though. Andreas also had a lot of remote experience. Do you want to talk about that, Andreas?

Andreas: Sure. So, I’ve run many many many project startups. They’re generally around a fortnight in time. Some are a week, some are a bit longer. They were all co-located – we’ve always gone to the clients offices and run them there. One of the things that you alluded to with the technical handover is that you need to cycle people through the room, and this is one idea that you get people to attend some sessions. Attending any sessions is better than none at all. Establishing a practice whereby a stakeholder will proxy responsibility to the person who’s in the room is a great thing to normalise during inceptions, and something I’m a real proponent of, so that you’ve always got the person who can make the decision in the room, which is one of the things that enables you to move at pace.

My experience, similar to Clare’s, but you going American direction means that you were doing late nights I assume?

Clare: Yeah.

Andreas: My experience is working with offshore teams in India, which means the 6.30 in the morning stand-up is something that I can’t say I enjoy, but it’s very productive. But at least it means your day shuts down by about three o’clock. So, we brought all the team over from India, run the inception and then they go back to India after another handover.

Clare: So our experience, we had a combination of the experience of communicating and working remotely on a day-to-day basis, and we had experience of running workshops. What we didn’t have was the experience of putting the two together. So, let’s talk about… We’ve got a section here that we’ve called ‘Tools and Rules’ – So the tools that we used, and the rules that we established in order to try and make this as effective as possible. I think probably at this point it’s worth me sharing my screen and talking a bit about Miro. It’s also worth saying that any tools that you use, you need to check with your organisation. Your organisation will have established procedures, and they will already have worked out which tools they’re happy to work with. Every organisation will have its own security considerations, so when you’re choosing the tools that you use, you must always check with your organisation for what the security considerations are, what’s recommended in-house, what your organisation likes to use. What we used was Miro and Zoom.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to quickly share my screen, just briefly, so that we can have a look at Miro. Now then, are you looking at a data diagram right now?

Andreas: That’s working, Clare.

Clare: Fantastic. Okay, so this was a diagram that we drew during the workshop. We’ll talk about that later, but Miro is a very useful tool because it allows you to draw diagrams collaboratively. It’s also, and I’m Zooming out now, so you’ll see that this is actually the Miro that we used during our inception. And you’ll see that we had different days, we’ve had different diagrams on different days, these were all being created collaboratively. You can see how easy it is for me to just navigate. I’m moving around. If there were people joining me at this point then they would all be visible like little dots moving around on the screen like little ants – which is incredibly useful for the facilitator – which Andreas can tell us a bit about. Because you can see where people are, also means you can say – no it’s too far over to the right, move to the left a bit, we’re all over here! – which can be quite funny. You can also turn that off because it can be distracting, but for a facilitator it’s extremely useful.

The ability to create collaborative diagrams; the ability to group them all in a space; the ability to have visual aids and to have something to look at, that can help to represent what you’re talking about; the ability to use post-its, just as you would on a physical wall – All of that is incredibly useful.

Okay so I’m going to stop sharing now, I just wanted to kind of give you a visual picture of that. And we also used Zoom. So Andreas, do you want to talk a bit about why we used Zoom – and what it is, actually, for those that don’t know?

Andreas: So here we go, swift recap: Again, Friday the 13th, we had what was called the ‘COVID catch-up’, and the outcome from that call was – you’re all remote, cancel your hotel rooms, all the post-it notes and lining paper and pens that you’ve had ordered to go all the way to Leeds, I assume they’re in a store room somewhere, so when we run the next inception we were good to go up there!  So I came out and I needed to quickly acquire a tool-set that we could use, that I could share, had reasonable security and enabled me to run the workshops in the way that I did. I had used Miro before, the collaborative whiteboarding tool that Clare’s described. I also had Google Hangouts, I’ve used Microsoft Teams, I’ve used myriad of other ones.

However, Zoom – even though it’s a paid service, and very quickly we discovered it had a fairly rocky path from a security perspective – If you set the security up correctly, it was fit for purpose for us. But the key factor was that we had breakout rooms, and breakout rooms are the ability for you to take your entire group of people collaborating – say you have a dozen people on the call at the same time… One aside there: We ran this from pre the workshops through the entire day, I didn’t turn the system off, so it ran for nine hours solid, didn’t drop any video pictures. Some people had connectivity issues, but for me it was rock solid. And that constant video feed which, we will talk about in a short while, meant that I could be reassured that people were there, people were productive, nobody was particularly stressed. But once again, 12 people in a room – every so often you need to break them into smaller groups for reflective time so we can achieve things, and then bring them back together and collaborate. And the breakout rooms is the USP for Zoom, for me. I suppose rock-solid stability and the breakout rooms.

It has other features like voting and timers. I do operate with the least-use principle in that I’m only going to focus on a core set of features. I generally rely on your technologists, Clare, to actually tell me all the amazing things that we can do, but I have a core level of functionality that I need, and Zoom as a conference calling tool and Miro as our whiteboarding tool they worked well for us.

Clare: If we’re to remember what we were trying to achieve, we’re building relationships, we’re understanding the domain, we’re getting to know each other, so the ability to put post-its on walls, draw diagrams, but also the ability to go into smaller groups, is absolutely key here. If you’re running a workshop in a in a big space with a lot of people, you will always be breaking people up into smaller groups, because one of the things that’s really important, whether you’re remote or not, is participation. You want people to be engaged and you want people to be contributing. You want to make the most of the fact that you have all of these different viewpoints and these differing skills and these different pieces of knowledge. You want to gather all of that together and synthesise it. And break-out rooms, small groups, is a really really effective way of increasing participation, and in getting that knowledge transfer. And so, being able to do that remotely is really really important. It makes an enormous amount of difference.

And the other thing that I want to talk a bit about is rules. So there were various things that we said in advance to people – If you do this it will make it better, and this is really key to working remotely, particularly with large numbers of people. We had about 10 to 12 people I think.

One of those is headsets. So we said to people – Please please get yourself a headset. The reason for that is that if the sound is coming out of your laptop, it’s much more likely to feed back, particularly if there’s a delay. So if it’s not coming through your headphones but it’s just coming out of your laptop, or out of speakers, then it’s going to go back into your mic, and if there’s a delay people will hear an echo. You’ll also get feedback. You’ll also just generally, you won’t get as good sound quality, and people are having to put a lot of effort in to concentrate and work out what’s happening. So anything which increases that load, like for instance if they can’t quite hear properly, or if they’re having to try not to pay attention to a nasty echo, it’s going to make the experience less pleasant but also increase the cognitive load for them.

So this brings us to another rule, which was that we kept our sessions short and our breaks long, because actually remote working is surprisingly tiring. We were all saying – oh my gosh it’s so tiring! – because you’re doing so much extra, your brain is having to do more stuff than it would normally do. If we were all in the same room we’d be getting non-verbal cues and we wouldn’t even know we were doing it. We’d be seeing things at the corner of our eye… go on, Andreas.

Andreas: Yeah let me interrupt! Yeah, and just this this idea of… you mentioned the technical factors of – we’ve got software in place, we’ve got headsets in place. The other thing, and I think this was kind of the fortunate effect of lockdown, was the fact that everybody was one-to-one with their machine. Right at the beginning we had a couple of people who clustered around a laptop, and it immediately affected the dynamic of how we were working, so when we moved to this very clean fact that everybody had a screen to themselves, everybody had a communication to themselves –  it meant that there was parity with all of the relationships. Because having been in sessions where you’ve had half a dozen remote people and then a conference room, and they’re on the wall of faces and everybody else is in the room, you know that the people around the board table go off and have a conversation or an aside, and it means that there is disparity between the – I want to say ‘power’ – level of influence or the level of interactivity that people have within the session. So the flat space of everybody in their home office, on their own machine, it was from a facilitator’s perspective particularly easy to actually manage.

Clare: Yeah, so that was one of our rules we did request – if one is remote, all remote – Please, even if you’re in the same building, can you go to opposite corners. Can you go and find your own space – so that everybody’s having the same experience and so that you’re not tempted to turn and talk to each other, and you can hear each other but everybody else can’t necessarily hear you. And so that was another one of our rules.

Andreas: So just to say that Miro is also effective, in that you need a one-to-one relationship with Miro, and that everybody is present virtually within the whiteboard. And once again, you can ask everybody to cluster together, otherwise you have to rely on the group of people who are together. I’m just drawing a parallel between the two software choices.

I think we’ve seguéd rather neatly into our rules into risks, because you began to talk about people being tired there. Should we formally talk about this? What were the risks that we had? And we’ll start with the risks with people.

Clare: Yeah, do you want to talk a bit about that Andreas? About looking after people, how did we look after people?

Andreas: So, it’s always really awkward starting off a project, because you have a group of people, some of whom have worked together probably for a long time and have mature relationships, and then the classic one where you are the client slash customer, or you are the consultant group or the technical team. You have to bring them together, and the non-embarrassing warm-up exercises that I do are designed to just to begin to get people communicating. And this is done when you’re focusing on the projects. It’s not like speed dating or anything like that, but it’s designed to enable people to begin to trust one another, to be able to talk freely, to be able to talk about things like problems, in that we’ve been trying to manage this issue within the service for a long time and then we can actually have a discussion and come up with an idea about fixing it.

So we start off with no trust, and I have a wall of people on the screen that we have to do virtual exercises to get them to engage. That is a challenge that we started off with. We have some Miro board exercises that are your classic warm-ups, that enable those to, at the very least beginning, to get people talking. But once again, breaking down into small groups. I feel or I can see the evidence from it, from our sessions, that began to get people mentioning people by name – you said this. and there you begin to develop relationships there.

Sat over this, and I’m going to play back now with what you just said Clare, and this was about fatigue and burnout: The thing I didn’t appreciate at the beginning but thankfully learnt very very quickly, one of the things we did at the end of every day like good Agile practitioners, is we ran a retrospective. And I think they were quite honest early on. Normally people who are not used to this way of working, you’re a little hesitant in retrospectives, but we can’t have change unless you tell us what we should stop doing, and wouldn’t it be better if we worked like this, oh and some things are great, can we continue working like that?

We begin to find that people say – I’m so tired! I’ve been working with a rule set of 90 minutes working then a quarter of an hour break. We really quickly changed to 45 minutes of screen time and a 15 minute break. So that did mean that three quarters of the working day was spent, me encouraging people to be away from their screens. But I was aware that we had 10 solid working days of video-conferencing for eight hours a day, therefore if I overloaded people at the beginning, burned them out, my productivity would hit rock bottom and possibly have a minor insurrection by week two, and I wanted people to still be encouraged and able to work by week two. So once again, that was for every hour three quarters of it was spent working; 15 minutes was spent encouraging people to be away from their screens, just avoid eye-strain. Eye-strain is just a physical thing, but the simple burnout and fatigue is just cumulative.

Clare: And it’s not just eye-strain. Like I said before, it’s the cognitive load of where the only cues you have are a two-dimensional representation in front of you, and it’s not so easy to look at everybody at once and you don’t pick up on those little cues that you normally don’t even know are there.

So yes, we were finding that we were tired. And also it’s interesting the retros did work really well. Oh, it’s worth sharing a little exercise that Andreas did at the very beginning, where he got us all to put our photos in Miro with our names underneath, and I think maybe phone numbers… But you know that that was a good way of introducing each other.

But there were other risks. So we talked about the retros and they did work well, but we did have problems, and one of the things that we learned I think was that we should have spent more time one-to-one with the key stakeholders, both before and during. So we could have spent more time with the key stakeholders, the people who have that overview of the project and who are going to be really responsible for moving it forward, finding out what their desires were, what their problems were, how they saw the inception going, both before and during.

Because most of the time we were spending together was all of us in a group, it meant that it was quite hard sometimes for them to surface any issues that they had, and there was a delay sometimes in finding out that actually they would have liked to be doing things slightly different and that they had suggestions. It took us longer to respond to that than it would have done if we’d have been physically present, because we would have been having chats over the kettles, we would have been pulling each other aside and having little chats at the end of the day. None of that was happening, so you have to really concentrate on – are you having effective communication with the key people? Are you putting time aside for that?

And also something that wasn’t happening, we weren’t having lunch together, we weren’t having chats over the kettle, we weren’t all going to the pub or to a cafe together in the evenings. So we were losing out on a lot of that time when we would have just been naturally building relationships, and it was quite hard to do artificially. So we did attempt to have some group lunches, and we had something we called the virtual pub, but people were tired! They just wanted… they’d had enough screen time, they didn’t want to be on yet another Zoom call, even if it was just for chat.

So, you know, and I think one of the things that I don’t have any easy solutions for, that I think actually it’s a question. Yes suggest those things, don’t push too hard, but we did have some lunches and we did have some virtual pubs and they were worthwhile, but we had to be aware that there was a limit to how much of that we could do. So partly it’s about just recognising that building those relationships will be slower than it would have been if you’d have been co-located.

So what other challenges did we say?

Andreas: Well we’ve got this big call-out that we have to do at the bottom of our notes here, is that a pandemic is a stressor, in the fact that I certainly know that from my perspective, the ability to bury myself in a fortnight deeply in a project, meant that I could avoid what was happening in the world. But it kept working its way into the project. We had to start not only talking about the project itself, but to say, we were having conversations about the pandemic. What is going to happen? What is happening? And therefore, those asides that you mentioned, it was strange. I found personally that I’d do set up for an hour before the workshops ran in the morning, and people would join and just chat, and that was really valuable. It set the scene for the day. And when we looked at how many people have been affected that day, and that kind of thing… and this wasn’t simply for the fact that it was Skills for Care. They managed the adult social care dataset, and therefore they were being pulled off to go off to meetings, because suddenly this data became of paramount importance. Certainly from the COVID response perspective.

But there was that underlying stress, so not merely the failure to be co-located, not merely the fact that it’s a new project, it just compounded all of these together. Therefore cutting people a bit of slack and having to formally make time, as in a kind of one-to-one style, to make sure that people are in the right place and they are happy with what’s going on. I agree more effort should have been made in that, but all of it eats up project time, and I’m already concerned that I’m losing project time in the spin-up, so a really tricky balance to be made.

Clare: It is a tricky balancing act. I think that because you can’t spend so much time in workshops every day, I think maybe one of the things… and we did have to drop some sessions that we would have had, and I think maybe, I don’t know, it’s difficult because obviously by the end of two weeks people are itching to move forward and get going…

But I do think that generally if you’re planning something like this, allow more time than you would have done. It will probably take longer because your days will have to be shorter, because you need to give people time to kind of recuperate between sessions. And one of the things that we noticed was that normally if we were all in a room, then at the beginning of every day we would walk the wall, we would show people… We would physically walk around and look at what has gone up on the wall the previous day, which would typically be diagrams, post-its, we did that in this space as well, we looked at Miro at the beginning of every day and we reviewed what we’d done the day before. But that was all together as a group, looking at the Miro board on a screen, and I do think that’s less effective than actually… [Clare’s screen freezes]

Andreas: Oh I fear Clare has just broken it! So, the challenge there, so we were talking about walking the wall. One of the facts that we did every morning, I mean the reason we’re in the room together is the fact that all the work that we’ve done in the session so far is on the walls, and radiating information. However… when I’m actually having to show a Miro board… hello Clare!

[Clare reappears]

Clare: Sorry about that, I don’t know what happened then!

Andreas: Yeah we’ll move on at a pace, so we have to mention the lack of tangential insights, which was the fact that these information radiators, you walk in and you go, fresh in the morning, why are we doing it like that? That’s the reason we put all this effort into diagrams, so that people can draw those tangents between things and have those epiphanies, those great ideas. Sorry Clare, that’s my little wrap-up to that section there.

Clare: So I’m guessing you didn’t hear me talk about tangential insights then?

Andreas: No, you’d gone by then!

Clare: Oh dear, okay well you’ve said it anyway.

Andreas: So yeah let’s quickly move on to our solution for Skills for Care, and our project with them.

Clare: You’ve mentioned that what we’re developing for them is a website which allows their users to enter – it’s called the Adult Social Care Workforce dataset. So we are gathering data from adult social care providers. And, as we’ve seen in the pandemic, this was very useful, so for instance it allows the government to have statistics about the workforce, and that was very relevant in terms of – how will the workforce be impacted? Are they likely to be high risk themselves in terms of COVID? And as we’ve seen that adult social care has really struggled during the pandemic.

Andreas: And those kind of call-outs, like as we discovered the number of people over 60 working in adult social care which makes themselves vulnerable, and therefore they have to be shielded. Fascinating, but sorry we’re really indulging ourselves there.

Clare: So one of the things that we wanted to know about was ways of working, wasn’t it? So we wanted to decide – how are we going to work together? And so that was one of the things that we needed to talk about. But we also needed to find ways of working together within the context of the workshop. So for instance, one of the things that we did was we used voting, and Andreas was an absolutely fantastic facilitator.

I wonder if it’s worth you talking about your facilitation, and how you were making sure that people were participating?

Andreas: So, to paint the picture: We have the Zoom call with a dozen faces on a screen, a Miro board with everybody’s cursor with their name on it. What’s happened in conference calls, since the conference call was invented, is that everybody will talk, then everybody will stop talking, and then everybody will talk again. And a facilitator’s role in a virtual environment like this is to set the scene, describe what we’re going to achieve within the next session, describe how the outcomes should be. As I mentioned, the prep time before the sessions is – in Miro, have the board set up, have some demonstration post-it notes, possibly with links between them, so that I can say – This is what we will be doing, success looks like this. Me being too prescriptive is a dangerous state to be in, otherwise people will just produce exactly what you’ve described.

And I actually want the knowledge from the assembled group to actually be on a board, so that we can discuss it and agree on it. So, the actual mechanics, once I’ve set the scene, is then saying – and now Clare will talk about this – and people, we got used to actually, like being at school, putting a hand up, because we’re all on a video call. And then I’ll say –  Jack will speak next, then Laura will speak next, and therefore my job very quickly moves from having set the scene of the session, and beginning to lead the session. So then, herding the cats as it were, to ensure that everybody has a voice within the session. I had to use timeouts occasionally, when people talked on, and said – this is great but we are delivering to a fixed time box. And we had a ‘parking lot’ didn’t we?

So all of these factors enabled anything that was going to absolutely erode our efficiency. Either you’ll put it in the parking lot, assign it to somebody, then they can do that offline. We also have the fact that, once again, you had to be aware that everything just takes longer to do. So I had to set my sights on achieving less during the session, which is really distressing to do, because you’ve always got less time than you need. And this has had another chunk taken off it. But the big risk that we had was by delaying the project itself, and we couldn’t do that.

Clare: We’ve got five minutes left, so let’s just talk a little bit about challenges. Things that didn’t go so well. So, on the back of that, what would we do differently next time?

So I think some of the things that I’d call out is that we would give our stakeholders more input. We would spend more time with them one-to-one, pay more attention to any problems that they had with the process, and allow them to talk to us quickly and change things around if things aren’t quite the way they want them to be.

Andreas: Just to qualify that as an absolute tangible, is that we need to be able to describe the business vision, be it in a ‘North Star’ or be it as an elevator pitch, or however the team will… it’s best for them to consume. But that simple statement of – Why are we all in the room? What is our ultimate goal?

Clare: Yeah, you need to get that sewn up as quickly as possible. I think we probably would have done more prep. If we get better again, if we’d had more notice, because as we said, we decided on Friday that we’re going remote on Monday, but yeah, more prep, and being aware of the time constraints and really kind of planning that in. I think that’s something we should have done.

I wonder if now is a good point for us to ask Laura to bring up, we’ve got three slides. We haven’t used slides, because we wanted it to be a bit more organic, but we do have three slides where we can just talk about – what are the key pieces of information that we think are useful, for people who are going to be facing a similar situation?

How about we take it in turns, Andreas? So if I quickly go through this one:

Look after your people. People really really matter. If you if you’re not looking after them, then things are going to deteriorate quickly. So, short sessions, long breaks, be aware that they’re going to get tired, make sure that they’re looking after themselves and they’re getting a chance to be away from the screen, and do whatever you can to allow for some social interaction.

And the Tools that we used were Miro and Zoom, but you need to check guidelines for your organisation, be aware of any security issues. Okay, next slide. Do you want to do this one Andreas?

Andreas: So, Rules for remote workshops: As Clare said before, everyone wearing headsets, dial in separately, no two people in the room, let’s get parity here so that everybody has the same ability to interact. Oh yeah make sure you’ve got reasonable WiFi. I had some problems initially, but Virgin thankfully gave me a new router really quickly and that worked out. I’m assuming everybody’s got amazing WiFi these days!

Prep for the sessions. The facilitator’s role begins earlier than everybody and finishes later than everybody. It’s a cross I must bear, but I love doing. So, everything takes longer. I will get stressed by – I feel that we’re not achieving enough during the sessions because the days are too short, and it simply takes longer to do anything. Be aware that will happen. And in the morning, share the schedule. Don’t make it too big, so that people feel they’re achieving and moving forwards. Set the context of how this sits within the entire framework, and that the direction of travel is agreed. Back to the North Star.

Clare: Okay, so, Tips for good communication and collaboration: Be aware that you’re missing non-verbal communication, and actually using the hand up sign is a really good one, but have a facilitator who is paying attention. Strong facilitation, pay attention to people who aren’t participating. Pay attention to when somebody is trying to speak but they’ve not got a chance. So for instance, Andreas will quite often say – I think Rob was trying to say something – or use break-out rooms for more engagement and more focused talk, allowing people to go into small groups. We think three is a particularly good number for a break-out session. So really small numbers so that everybody gets a chance to have their say and to be engaged.

Have separate sessions with key stakeholders, both in advance and during, so that you can make sure that everybody’s on board and you’re aware of any issues. Listen to everyone and give people a chance to change direction if that’s needed. Have a retro at the end of every day. And using diagrams and visual aids. We didn’t go back to it actually, but right at the beginning when I showed you Miro, the very first thing I showed you was a data flow diagram that we created collaboratively in Miro. We started out in small break-out groups who created three separate diagrams, and then we came together as a big group, and we managed to turn three quite different diagrams into one big, beautiful diagram. It was really quite amazing to watch. It worked very well.

Jack: Lovely stuff guys, that was absolutely fantastic. I think we’ll tap straight in with our first question if you guys are ready? First question: “Did you find people were less communicative via video call, and if you did, how did you get them talking? I run a few workshops that I’d normally do in person I found it difficult to get people talking sometimes they seem a bit more self-conscious over video call.”

Clare: Yeah, they are. Do you want to handle that one, Andreas?

Andreas: Sure, yes. Assume that everybody is terrified. You’ve gotta make sure that you’re in a safe space, nobody’s gonna be judging you by the clothes you’ve got drying in the background, or when your child walks in. I set the very simple rules that we are in your home, working. You are not ‘working from home’ – this is a pandemic. You have to be there, and the environment is that we’re invited into your room.

The warm-up exercises as well, they sound crass, they sound embarrassing, but they’re actually really valuable for actually beginning to enable people to talk. And it takes a great deal of patience to get people to be communicating comfortably and efficiently. I think take your time, being very explicit about kindness and about… that it’s okay, don’t worry. Trying to do everything you can to put people at ease, and also putting people in break-out rooms makes a massive difference. Do that as soon as possible. I’ve since run online workshops where I found that everybody was very quiet, it was difficult to get people to participate, but after they’d been in groups and been given something enjoyable to do, given something that wasn’t too hard that they could enjoy in small enough groups that they could feel comfortable – When they come back into the room, you can feel the difference. They’re much more comfortable about speaking up and participating.

But being patient, and also be careful about… don’t put people on the spot. Like for instance, it can be tempting to go – Right, okay what does everyone think about this? – and then you’re faced with silence! Trying to find ways of asking people to participate that are not going to make them feel too exposed or put too much pressure on them. But it is tricky.

Jack: Next question: “Did being fully remote make it harder or easier to get all the right people in the room for inception? It feels like maybe it’d be easier to get more senior stakeholders on a call than physically get them into a meeting room during inception?”

Well we didn’t have trouble. All the people we wanted we got, and we were we were really pleased because I’m sure we’ve both had that experience that, you know, you need key people, you need the movers and shakers, you need the decision makers, and you need the people that know the useful stuff, and it can be tricky getting all the right people in a room. And I know that we’ve both had that problem, and we’re both very pleased that we didn’t have that problem here, but it’s hard to know if that was because we were remote, or just because we were working with a really great organisation that were committed and wanted to be involved.

Yeah I suspect that Skills for Care were really motivated by the start-up of the project, and therefore we had access to the sponsors and stakeholders. I suspect that remote is actually easier for stakeholders and sponsors. I have no evidence to support that, but maybe the ‘remote first’ way of working is potentially a good way of working. Sorry I’ve segued there. We need to have done several of these in order to be able to compare trust, but even then it’s really hard to know.

Jake: Next question: “What do you think the future of collaborative workshop projects is? Do you think you’ll go back to in-person workshops as soon as you can, or do you think you’ll continue to explore remote working?”

You know what… We didn’t talk about this, but I have to confess I’m not a fan of remote working. This is not my preferred way of working, and given a choice I would rather be in a room. But having said that, I think that it’s going to be a long time before we have a vaccine. I think it’s going to be a long time before people are really comfortable in going back to how we used to work, and we may never go back to that, because I think by the time there’s a vaccine and people are 100% confident about being in a room together, a lot of people will have just got used to remote working and found that it works for them. So I think our offices are going to be emptier, and I also – because we’ve been doing this – I’ve found ways of doing remote working that I didn’t know about before. I’m more comfortable with it than I used to be, so I think there will be a lot more of this, a lot more collaborative, online, remote, you know, fully remote workshops. But still, if you gave me a choice, a completely free choice, I would still rather be in a room, just because I find communication and collaboration easier.

So I’m the counterpoint – I can’t claim that I adore remote working. However if I was given the option to run an inception – the rapid project start-up, the fortnight on the client site, safely – I would jump at the chance. The speed at which you get to know people, get to know the project, there’s nothing like it, and I actually love the environment. It’s great running remote, but there’s certain elements missing, and it’s the people element that isn’t coming across through the screen and the audio. So I can’t wait to get back on to client sites, but I’m really scared of doing that, because a session with everybody with masks on will just… that will be very strange, and I don’t think tenable at the moment.

Jack: Next question: “How did you find running retros remotely? We are doing retros remotely, and often it’s the same people who are found speaking. How did you get everyone to contribute and feel safe to share honestly?”

Andreas: Shall I do that, Clare? So, absolute classic methodology: I’d set the border with three columns. It was modified to ‘continue doing, stop doing right now and why don’t we try this?’ But the three columns had the same meaning of ‘stop, start, continue’ – I always encouraged us to do three minutes in silence. Telling a team to not talk is very powerful, and therefore everybody is at parity. I’m saying that a lot, but it’s important to bring quiet people up and bring loud people down. Everybody puts the notes on the board, we do a bit of clustering so we’ve got reasonable groups to manage, to discuss, and then I choose people to talk on the board. I’m operating as a really efficient facilitator in that mode, because I don’t want shouty people shouting and quiet people not to be heard.

I’ll add something to that: We’re currently on the project, running fortnightly retros we’re using fun retro which is another useful tool – again, check with your organisation –  and what we do is we encourage people to add cards to the board before the retro starts, so that those cards are already there, so people have already written things down, the equivalent of writing post-its. But I think that business of allowing people to write as well as speak helps to counter that thing of it always being the same voices. Encouraging people and giving them a bit of a prod beforehand as well, and saying –  have you thought about what you’d like to talk about during the retro? – giving people that time to write things down rather than just asking them to speak. Are you actually giving people time to write, because we’re slightly contrary here and we’re putting time pressure on people and then giving them the opportunity to do things when they’ve got some time free. Well I think both, I think actually if you do both, so if you make sure people have access to a board in advance of the meeting so they can think about it, they’ve got plenty of time. But I think it’s also worth actually then giving them a bit of time at the beginning of the meeting as well, to see if there’s anything else they want to add, the time beforehand – so remote – actually might make for more honest retros.

Jack: There we go. Bombshell – right guys, this is going to be our last question, I think. This is a good one to round off on: “If you were to pick your top three tips to spin up digital projects remotely, what would they be?”

So, the first one is prep! Do your homework. Nothing enables better engagement with a client, customer, than actually being able to talk relatively knowledgeably about the landscape and the domain. With remote it’s even more important because they can’t just show you something, you have to be actively engaged in research as early on as possible. I know that’s really difficult when you’re doing it remote as well, but prep.

Another one, it’s a really simple one: Headsets and everyone remote – which probably in current times, well I mean people are starting to move back into offices again now, but yeah, making sure that everybody – if one is remote all are remote. Make sure that people have decent headsets, very important when remote.

And the other one is: Look after people! Remember that these are people that you’re working with established ground rules. Talk explicitly about the fact that you need to be kind to each other, and that everybody is doing their best, and that you know that you want to have a no-blame culture, and that you want to be supportive of one another. Create a safe space – put effort into creating a safe space. I mean, that applies anywhere, but I think particularly online, when people have got other things going on. And so that thing about saying it’s okay if your child enters the room behind you, we’re not going to judge you for that, in fact introduce them to us, it’s not a problem, and we’d like to meet your cat as well!  We actively want to meet pets, don’t we Clare?

That final one, because I think we’ve done three between us, which is the most valuable way to bring you… the being respectful of people, it’s the cornerstone of establishing trust, which I think was right at the beginning of our presentation, and I don’t feel I’ve reinforced that enough. It’s about when people talk honestly to you, then you’ve got the ability to collaborate efficiently. Remote just means it’s more effort, and it’s a lot more effort for facilitators, and it’s a lot more effort for attendees as well. That’s the cornerstone of the high performance team that we want to get towards. That’s a whole big other topic, but just on that topic of trust, be aware it will take longer. Don’t be impatient – everything will take longer, establishing trust will take longer, building those good honest trustful relationships will take longer, so be aware of that, don’t be shocked when that happens.

Jack: Lovely stuff guys. That’s it for time I’m afraid, but I just want to round off by saying a huge thank you to Clare and Andreas for speaking with us today, and an even bigger thank you to all our attendees who have shown up, made time for us today, thank you so much.

We will be sending out a feedback email straight after this. It takes about one minute to fill out and it goes such a long way for us improving our future events, because as you know this is our very first Made Tech Talks webinar.

Our next webinar, we are aiming to have coming out in the 26th of August with our very own Scott Edwards. He’s one of our Senior Engineers here at Made Tech, and he’s looking to be talking about upskilling your technical teams effectively. We’ll be publishing that on our website shortly, but everyone who attended today, we’ll keep you in the loop.

If you want to stay in touch, you’ll find out what Clare and Andreas are up to, we have their socials displayed on the screen now, or if you just want to stay in the loop with all things Made Tech please feel free to contact us. Any unanswered questions today, please feel free to ask us. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can. And last but not least, just a massive thank you to everyone involved. Clare and Andreas, thank you for speaking today, and one more time thank you all for coming. Have a lovely afternoon. Thank you, take care, bye.