I'm a Mozilla Release Engineer. Which means I am a strong advocate for remote teams. Our team is very distributed and I believe we are successful at it too.
Funnily enough, I think a big part of the distributed model includes getting remote people physically together once in a while. When you do, you create a special energy. Unfortunately that energy can sometimes be wasted.
Have you ever had a work week that goes something like the following:
You stumble your way to the office in a strange environment on day one. You arrive, find some familiar faces, hug, and then pull out your laptop. You think, 'okay, first things first, I'll clear my email, bugmail, irc backscroll, and maybe even that task I left hanging from the week before.'
At some point, someone speaks up and suggests you come up with a schedule for the week. A google doc is opened and shared and after a few 'bikeshedding' moments, it's lunch time! A local to the area or advanced yelper in the group advertises a list of places to eat and after the highest rated food truck wins your stomach's approval, you come back to the office and ... quickly check your email.
The above scenario plays out in a similar fashion for the remainder of the week. Granted, I exaggerate and some genuine ideas get discussed. Maybe even a successful side sprint happens. But I am willing to bet that you, too, have been to a team meet up like this.
So can it be done better? Well I was at one recently in Vancouver and this post will describe what I think made the difference.
Prior to putting out burning trees at Mozilla, I put out burning trees as a Forest Firefighter in Canada. BC Forest Protection uses the Incident Command System (ICS). That framework enabled us to safely and effectively suppress wildfires. So how does it work and why am I bringing it up? Well, without this framework, firefighters would spend a lot of time on the fire line deciding where to camp, what to eat, what part of the fire to suppress first, and how to do it. But thanks to ICS, these decisions are already made and the firefighters can get back to doing work that feels productive!
You can imagine how team meet ups could benefit from such organization. With ICS, there are four high level branches: Logistics, Planning, Operations, and Finance & Administration. The last one doesn't really apply to our 'work week' scenario as we use Egencia prior to arriving and Expensify after leaving so it doesn't really affect productivity during the week. However, let's dive into the other three and discover how they correlate to team meet ups.
For each of these branches, someone should be nominated or assigned and complete the branch responsibilities.
Logistics
Ideally the Logistics lead should be someone who is local to the area or has been there before. This person is required to create an etherpad/Google Doc that:
- proposes a hotel near the office
- describe the hotel
- provide directions from the airport. map screenshots encouraged
- provide directions from the hotel to the office.
- propose restaurants to eat for each day of the week
- poll food restrictions within the team
- reserve the restaurants in advanced
- work with the office Work Place Resource
- book a room/space within the office
- sign up team to office lunches
- get key cards/fobs assigned and ready to be handed out
- send out an email with link to the doc that contains all this information.
Now you might be saying, "wait a second, I can do all those things myself and don't need to be hand held." And while that is true, the benefit here is you reduce the head space required on each individual, the time spent debating, and you get everyone doing the same thing at the same time. This might not sound very flexible or distributed but remember, that's the point; you're centralized and together for the week! You might also be thinking "I really enjoy choosing a hotel and restaurant." That's fine too, but I propose you coordinate with the logistics assignee prior to the work week rather than spend quality work week time on these decisions.
Planning
Now that you have logistics sorted, it's time to do all the action planning. Traditionally we've had work weeks where we pre-plan high level goals we want to accomplish but we don't actually fill out the schedule until Monday as a group. The downside here is this can chew up a lot of time and you can easily get side track before completing the schedule. So, like Logistics, assign someone to Planning.
This person is required to create a [insert issue tracker of choice] list and determine a bugs/issues that should be tackled during the week. The way this is done of course depends on the issue tracker, style of the group, and type of team meet up but here is an example we used for finishing a deliverable related goal.
write a list of issues for each of the following categories:
- hard blockers
- nice to haves
- work in progress
- done but needs to be verified
- completed
For the above, we used Trello which is nice as it's really just a board of sticky notes. I could write a whole separate blog post on how to to be effective with it by incorporating bugzilla links, assignees to cards, tags, sub-lists, and card voting but for now, here is a visual example:
The beauty here is that all of the tasks (sticky notes) are done upfront and each team member simply plucks them off the 'hard blockers' and 'nice to have' lists one by one, assigns them to themselves, and moves them into the completed section.
No debating or brainstorming what to do, just sprint!
Operations
The Operations assignee here should:
- be a proxy to the outside world
- be a moderator internally
If you want to take advantage of a successful physical team meetup, forget about the communication tools that are designed for distributed environments.
During the work week I think it is best to ignore email, bug mail, and irc. Treat the week like you are on PTO: change your bugzilla name and create a vacation responder. Have the Operations assignee respond to urgent requests and act as a proxy to the outside world.
It is also nice to have the Operations assignee moderate internally by constantly iterating over the trello board state, grasping what needs to be done, where you are falling behind, and what new things have come up.
Vancouver by accident
This model wasn't planned or agreed upon prior to the Vancouver team meetup. It actually just happened by accident. I (jlund) took on the Logistics, rail handled Planning, and catlee acted as that sort of moderator/proxy role in Operations. Everyone at the meet up finished the week satisfied and I think hungry to try it again.
I'm looking forward to using a framework like this in the future. What's your thoughts?
