Thanks to our sponsors and lessons from a remote-first pilot
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DeliverConf 2020 - Project Management Conference, Manchester, UK
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Thanks to our sponsors and lessons from a remote-first pilot
- 1. With thanks to our sponsors
- 3. 07/03/202007/03/2020 During a period of trasformational chaos Vivi Campbell I Lead Delivery Manager BBC Voice+AI Remote-First Pilot @CampbellVivi in/vivi-campbell
- 4. 07/03/2020 Molood Ceccarelli - Remote Forever Summit Remote work is the future reality of our work these days, whether we like it or not. As an Agile person, it’s on you to adapt and learn the skills to work remotely and empower others to do so as well. “ ”
- 5. 07/03/2020 a bit about me First things first…
- 7. 07/03/2020 since February 2018 Delivery Lead 7
- 10. 07/03/2020 How were we working together • Early days with Remote-first practices • Tools already in place - Slack, Zoom • All Hands meeting on Zoom • “Virtual” barrier/divide between locations • Ineffective hybrid meetings
- 12. 07/03/2020 Remote-First Pilot "We were going to run a “Video-First” pilot over the Summer." Whaaaaaat???? Why now?
- 13. 07/03/2020 1 3 Why now? • Work better as a distributed team • Limited office space • Travel costs • Prove business continuity • Attract and retain talent • Technology allows us to do it well • Plenty of resources available
- 15. 07/03/2020 1 5 Timeline of events May: First email Mid-June: Creation of the Handbook by a cross- discipline working group Mid-July: Email announcement, Remote All Hands and DSE requirements 5th August: Remote-First Pilot begins - Whole department, including all disciplines End-August: First Health Check 27th September: End of the trial End-September: Second Health Check October: Shared results with team and beyond
- 16. 07/03/2020 1 6 Parallel timeline - A.K.A transformational chaos May Mid-June Mid-July 5th August End-August 27th September End-September October New Programme of work announced Re-organised delivery into capability-led teams + New roles Introduced OKRs Kicked off Discovery phase Rolled out OKRs Summer holidays
- 17. 07/03/2020 17 Briefing the team • Prioritise video-first over co-located meetings • Pick your preferred location - UK only • Be flexible with your core hours • Use the Remote-First handbook • Push the boundaries! We want to find problems.
- 18. Learnings the wins and watch-outs!
- 19. 07/03/2020 19 The good stuff • Positive impact on wellbeing and work life balance • Reduced commute • Less distracting environment at home • Collaboration across locations was made easier for some • Remote meetings on Zoom work well, including workshops
- 20. 07/03/2020 20 Things to avoid • Too much time in back to back Zoom meetings • Lacking social interactions and possibility of lower team morale • Hard to onboard new team members and learn from others • We don’t yet have all the right tools to work in this way
- 21. Getting started my key tips
- 22. 07/03/2020 22 Set the example • Switch your camera on!!! • Join in individually • Use headsets • Find a well-lit quiet space • Take regular breaks
- 23. 07/03/2020 23 Ground rules • Ask people to switch off their online distractions • Assign people to different roles • Use the raise your hand rule • Ask people to come prepared • Improve your asynchronous collaboration • Avoid hybrid meetings altogether!
- 24. 07/03/2020 24 You need to invest • Write your own Remote-first handbook • Get the right tools for real-time and asynchronous collaboration • Remote facilitation training • On-boarding new members and supporting Junior staff • Social engagements • Give people time and space to experiment and get used to it
- 25. 07/03/2020 25 Final takeaways • Learn the skills • The example starts with you • Set the rules from the offset • Be prepared to invest • Get feedback and iterate!
- 26. 07/03/2020 The ability to be able to choose to work a bit more flexibly is fantastic - it really makes me feel even happier to work for the BBC than before. Being given this autonomy makes me feel more valued and trusted as an employee. “ ”Anonymous - BBC Voice+AI Health Check Survey
- 27. Vivi Campbell I Lead Delivery Manager BBC Voice+AI @CampbellVivi in/vivi-campbell
Editor's Notes
- Hi everyone. I’m Vivi Campbell, Lead Delivery Manager in the Voice+AI department at the BBC. I’m here today to talk to you about a remote-first experiment we run in our department last year. I suppose I timed my talk very well, since it’s quite a hot topic right now.
- I want to start with this quote from Molood Caccarelli ,who organises a great fully-remote Agile Conference. What I like about this quote is that it highlights why learning about remote working practices is so important right now.
- But before we dive into the subject, let’s start with a little bit about me. By the accent, you can tell I’m not from the UK. About 12 years ago I traded the beautiful beaches of Rio for Manchester. I fancied a change of scenery, as you can see. This is actually Salford, but you get the gist.
- In December 2014 I joined the BBC and sent this picture to my mum back home. To this day she thinks that’s what I do. I guess she forgot I’m not a morning person though – start working at 6am??? No way.
- This is my reality. After working as a Project Manager for a while, I took on the role of Delivery Lead in a brand new department we call Voice+AI. The name kind of gives it away about what we do on a day-to-day.
- Just to give you some context. As a Delivery Lead at the Voice+AI department, I helped setup the department. From a team of 10 people that delivered BBC skill on Alexa, myself included, to over 100 people in a space of 12 months.
- We were born as a distributed department, with teams being formed in Salford, Glasgow and London. However, the split of all the different disciplines in the team isn’t evenly distributed across the three sites, so we can’t never be 100% fully co-located in each of the locations, there is always someone remote.
- Because we were distributed from the get go, we had already began our journey in adopting some remote-first practices. However, we still had some pretty big issues though. Us versus them type of behaviour/attitude across the different locations. Because of that, there was a lot of travelling to try to improve relationship building. Hybrid meetings – when everyone is in the room together and one person or few people join in remotely. It never works – lots of parallel conversations, the person is normally forgotten about. It’s just not the best experience for anyone.
- Then back in May 2019… I got a very interesting email from my boss saying…
- There were some valid business reasons for doing it and other contributing factors in our favour. Prove business continuity – a good example is the Corona Virus outbreak just now. We know we can work from home and deliver, so we are not panicking about it. Plenty of resources available – books, manifestos, Slack channels, studies…
- So, what was this experiment all about?
- I want to start with a timeline of events. As you can see, we didn’t have much time to prepare from receiving that first email and starting the trial. - One thing I really want to call out that made all the difference is our remote-first handbook, which was put together by a cross-discipline team. It was created as a guide with useful tips and good practices for everyone to follow during the trial and to ensure we worked together effectively. - We also run two team health check surveys to gather feedback from the teams. I’ll briefly touch on some of the learnings later on.
- Of course, this wasn’t the only thing we were doing. There was another layer of complexity on top of this experiment. There was a lot going on at that time, some pretty big changes as you can see, plus the Summer holidays. - Call out big discovery phase and introducing OKRs (seems simple, but if you have trying to implement it before, it’s not that easy). I like to call it the “transformational chaos”. I just wanted to illustrate it to give you all a bit more context, but I’ve only got 20 minutes today, so this is talk for next year, if they have me back. I probably need more than 20 minutes though to talk through everything.
- Here’s what we asked everyone to do during the two-months trial.
- From the feedback we received from the teams… We found most people took advantage of the location flexibility, the most common behaviour being to work from home 3 or 4 days a week People mostly still worked traditional hours with a few hours outside of this at least once a week Many became more positive as the trial went on, more than half became more positive about remote-first ways of working Overall results were mostly positive, but remote working isn’t for everyone, some people really didn’t like it… So what was good..
- Here are some of my tips for you, my take on remote working.
- If there’s one simple thing I want you to take out of this talk is to Switch your camera on.
- Set the shared rules from the offset and don’t be afraid to remind people they exist.
- You also need to invest not just moneywise, but with timewise too.
- To reiterate some of my earlier points…
- I want to leave you with this quote from a member from our teams in one of our surveys, just to show you how empowering remote-work can be.
- Thank you! If you have any feedback or questions, please contact me.