One of my colleagues, Al, private-messaged me. “I’m so much more effective now that we’re remote. I get a ton more work done. I’m so much happier. I love where the product is going. How can I do more of this?” Al feels productive and engaged. Why does he feel this way? When I spoke […]
When Mark Kilby and I wrote From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams, we suggested teams add a text backchannel. Even when the backchannel is asynchronous, the information in it increases the value of all the team’s communication. The backchannel helps everyone see all the information. That helps all the team’s communication. Some of my
Three Ideas to Boost Your Productivity Several Pragmatic Manager subscribers have asked me about how to build and maintain their productivity. They say they have these problems: The longer they work apart from other people, the less they have the “peer pressure” of a collaborative schedule. They find it hard to maintain focus for a long time.
Do you subscribe to my Pragmatic Manager email newsletter? I’ve been writing a ton about remote work. I sent How to Manage by “Walking Around” When You’re Remote a few days ago. If remote topics interest you, join Mark Kilby, Jeff Payne, and me on a Coveros webinar about From Chaos to Successful Distributed Teams
How to Manage by “Walking Around” When You’re Remote If you’re like me, you learned a lot by walking around and listening when you were in the office. I saw and heard the state of the various teams. I could see in-progress work. I could see and hear how the team members treated each other.
We’ve all heard of big organizations where the top management said, “No need to ever be back in the office. Work from home, as long as you want.” And, the Wall Street Journal has this article, Business Travel Won’t Be Taking Off Soon Amid Coronavirus (you might need to subscribe to see the article). (I
In the agile and lean communities, we talk a lot about transparency. This image is the transparency principle we used in From Chaos to Distributed Agile Teams. I see the most product and program success when the various teams create transparency between them, the middle of the continuum. That’s the full-product transparency. I see many
Work From Home? Three Ideas for Better Project Agility Samantha, an agile manager, had a big problem. Back before everyone had to work from home, they had pretty good results with their standard agile approach. However, now that this eight-person team worked from home, they had these problems: The team didn’t share the same work
As we move to more remote work, especially in these pandemic times, how do we integrate people so they can succeed? See Hiring Geeks That Fit for all the new employee checklists and how to use them. (Want to preview the checklists and templates? Download the HiringGeeksThatFitTemplates for yourself.) I updated the checklists with a
I’ve had the pleasure—and displeasure—of many remote meetings over the past few weeks. The difficult meetings had a common root cause: the meeting leaders attempted to do a direct transfer of how they lead an in-person meeting to remote/WFH meetings. When that occurs, they miss the ability to optimize on our separation by choosing how