Forem: Sarah Goff-Dupont

Revitalize your retrospectives with these fresh techniques

Sarah Goff-Dupont — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 18:14:28 +0000

Laura is a seasoned program manager who knows her way around a retrospective. So when her favorite technique lost its shine, she recognized the signs immediately. “The team was bringing up fewer topics, and we stopped having meaty discussions. Even attendance started to fall off.”

When your “tried and true” retrospective format inevitably goes stale, you need a go-to bag of tricks to freshen things up and keep your team engaged. With the help of teammates past and present, I’ve rounded up several fun variations to mix in.

Significant events

Find the biggest whiteboard you can and draw a horizontal line across the whole thing. This is your timeline. Ask team members to come up and mark releases, big wins, big fails, changes to team membership… anything that was significant for your team. Spend 10-15 minutes on this at the beginning of your retro to refresh your memories and set the stage for the rest of the session.

Start, stop, continue

If your team gets a little twitchy at the thought of talking about how they feel, ease them into it by focusing on what they’ll do. This variation has “action-oriented” built into its DNA, so it’s often a hit with folks who are highly pragmatic. If you use this format for the entire retrospective, spend 10 minutes each on start, stop, and continue. For longer retro sessions, you can also use it “lightning round-style” at the end as you’re identifying action items and owners.

Like, loathed, lacked, learned

What did you like about the past year? What did you loathe? What did you lack (or long for)? And most importantly, what did you learn? Allow 10 minutes for each question. As a bonus, the “4Ls” technique is great for personal retrospectives as well. Dom Price, our resident work futurist, steps through the 4Ls roughly once a quarter. “Holding myself accountable to taking action and actually making changes is the key,” he says. “I don’t allow myself to add a ‘longed for’ until I’ve removed a ‘loathed’.”

Speak like a human

It’s much easier to talk about project mechanics, rather than relationships and communication. But many issues that have nothing to do with tasks, and everything to do with human interactions. In such cases, the real_ conversation to be had is not in project language but in _people language.

Reserve a portion of your retrospective to discuss the interpersonal stuff. What are people’s assumptions and expectations? Where are the misunderstandings? How do people feel about their work? Why are the same improvement actions coming up again and again?

5 whys

When you identify a painful moment you’d like to avoid in the future, ask why the failure happened. Then, when you’ve agreed on the reason, ask why that was the case. And so on. After asking “why?” a few times, the root cause and long-term solution will be pretty clear. Allow 5-10 minutes for each pain point you plan to explore.

Dot voting

If loads of ideas for improvements emerge, vote on which action items you’ll prioritize in the immediate term. Start by listing them on the whiteboard. Then, have everyone grab a marker and place dots on the three ideas they’d like to see at the top of the list. Discuss the results with your team, prompting them with questions like “Why is that idea more valuable than the others?” and “What would happen if we didn’t do that?” Finally, select owners and due dates for the top-voted items.

Testify

If time allows (and team members are willing), have each participant share what strikes them as the most important thing the team discussed during the retrospective, and why it stands out to them. This helps ensure all team members contribute evenly and promotes deeper discussion.

Silly hats

Invite everyone in the group to wear a ridiculous hat to the retro. This helps encourage– _just kidding! _There’s no serious reason to do this. But don’t let that stop you if silly hats are your thing. Besides: the team that plays together stays together.

Acknowledgments

When you’re busy getting $#!τ done, it’s easy to let good deeds go un-noticed and un-thanked. Leave 5 minutes at the end for peer-to-peer kudos – even for little things like giving helpful feedback or being a sounding board. By this point in the retro, you’ve probably had some intense (perhaps uncomfortable) discussions, so use this technique to close the session on a high note.

What these retrospective techniques won’t fix (and what you can do)

To be fair, mixing in novel activities might be a band-aid solution if there are deeper issues troubling your team. “I’ve seen team engagement drop a number of times and for a number of reasons, but they all tie back to the team no longer believing retrospectives are useful”, says Penny, another seasoned Atlassian program manager. She points out a handful of reasons this might be.

The worst case scenario is the team feels like discussions in their retros are being used against them. That’s bad news, but you can help create a safe space by not mentioning who-said-what in your meeting notes. In extreme cases, you might choose not to take notes at all, or ask that the manager or stakeholders stay away for a session or two.

Or, if the action items coming out of retrospectives aren’t making an impact, the team may be disheartened. Are they being too ambitious or trying too many changes that could be working against one another? You might have more success by making small changes and treating them as experiments. If the team is frustrated by how slow things are progress, help them manage their expectations and build a sense of momentum by celebrating the small wins.

Teams in “crunch mode” may resist retrospectives because they feel they’re too busy right now. A team that already has a solid retrospective game would probably do the retro anyway and use it as a chance to figure out how to alleviate the pressure now and avoid it in the future. That said, sometimes we need to work with stakeholders and management as well to make sure we’re fostering an environment where teams are empowered to make improvements, even deadlines are looming.

Continuous improvement for the win

Keep in mind, there are other ways to change up your retrospective game. Hold it outdoors once in a while, or in a different room. Include people from adjacent teams if they were deeply involved in the work you’ll be reflecting on.

For Laura and her team, changing the cadence made a difference. “We spaced them out a bit more, and now the team walks in with more to talk about and more appetite for solving problems.” That same spirit of continuous improvement is important for facilitators, too. Keep experimenting, keep improving, and keep winning.

The post Revitalize your retrospectives with these fresh techniques appeared first on Atlassian Blog.

500 Atlassians worked remotely for a week – here’s what we learned

Sarah Goff-Dupont — Fri, 14 Dec 2018 15:00:41 +0000

Like most companies, Atlassian has a mixture of people who are working from home full-time (like me) and those who grab an ad-hoc day when the plumber is coming or they can’t stop sneezing. But our collective WFH muscles got a major workout recently when 500 of us went remote during the week-long gap between moving out of one office space and into another.

I talked to colleagues in several departments at Atlassian and dug into my own bag of tricks to bring you this collection of tips for working from home. And because working from home came with a few surprises, I’ll also share some little-known facts and a classic blooper – don’t miss these if you’re thinking of transitioning to full-time remote work.

Dedicate a work space and make it your own

Yes, this tip is at the top of every other list of working from home tips you’ve ever read. There’s a reason for that. When you work from an office, your commute helps your brain shift into “work mode”. At home, you can create that same mental shift by dedicating a spot for working.

“I have a separate desk at home that is pretty much only used for work,” says Miles, a marketing manager. “This helps me focus because I think of that area as a mini office.” If you’re short on space and have to use your couch or kitchen table, no worries. Just be consistent.

Trick out your home office space on the cheap, with the help of flea markets and a bit of DIY ingenuity.

Don’t just stop once you’ve acquired a desk, though. Give your space some personality with wall art, framed photos, a desk lamp to die for, or an essential oil diffuser if that’s your jam.

Pace yourself

Y’know how running to the office kitchen to refill your coffee “real quick-like” typically results in a 10-minute hallway convo about your big new project? I didn’t understand the value of interludes like that until I went remote. At first, I would blast through my tasks for the week in about three days because there were so few interruptions. Sounds great, except I’d be completely out of gas by Thursday. And Fridays were, umm, less than productive.

Your work week is a marathon – not a sprint. I quickly learned to sprinkle a few 5-10 minute pace breaks throughout the day, away from my desk if possible. For my teammate Claire, her furry friend makes all the difference. “I take my dog for a walk before I start work, at lunch, early afternoon, and after I’m done for the day. It’s a great mental break.” Not to mention healthy.

Do ten push-ups or hold yourself in plank pose. Pick up your guitar. Make your grocery list. Your stamina (and your team) will thank you.

Be brutally self-aware

While some people (me included) absolutely love working from home, others love the idea of working from home… only to find the reality doesn’t suit them. And that’s ok. “It’s tough to get started, and it’s tough to set things aside when I’m done for the day,” says Jim, a developer on the Bitbucket team. “I also feel isolated from the rest of the team.” That’s a common sentiment, so don’t be afraid to own it.

If transferring back into an office isn’t an option, self-awareness will help you find your WFH groove. Develop some strategies for staying connected to your team and understand what will help you focus vs. what will distract you. Have an open, on-going dialog with your team and check in with yourself regularly. Conversely, if you love working from home, take the time to reflect on why and make the most of those aspects.

Stock your kitchen with food you're proud of

For those of us who’ve been spoiled by posh perks like company-provided meals, providing your own coffee and breakfast and lunch and snacks is quite an adjustment. A few days into his week of remote work, customer support analyst Orpheus (who is every bit as cool as his name suggests) lamented his lack of grab n’ go gnoshables: “Folks who work from home need a snack food budget.”

Regardless of who pays, the logistics are on you. If your lunch game involves anything more complicated than warming up last night’s leftovers, you’ll need to build prep and clean-up time into your workday routine. For maximum efficiency, pick up a full week’s worth of supplies each Monday morning (unless a daily walk to the store is your pace break of choice). Choose brain-boosting superfoods like almonds, broccoli, berries, beans, eggs, and salmon. Remember, working from home tends to be more sedentary than office-based work, so skip the Oreos.

Dress as if you were going to the office (almost)

Full-blown business attire probably isn’t necessary, but do make yourself presentable. You’re going to end up on a lot of video calls, for one thing (more on that later). More importantly, getting dressed is another important part of the mental shift into work mode. But don’t stop there. Establish a morning routine that is as close as possible to your routine when you’re going into an office. Here’s mine:

6:00 – Wake up, brush teeth, exercise.
7:00 – Get kids up, brew coffee, shower, get dressed (including hair and make-up), unload the dishwasher, help my daughter do her hair, curse at the stray Legos I inevitably step on.
8:00 – Take my son to preschool.
8:30 – Start work.

Rituals allow us to make transitions with minimal mental and emotional turbulence. Yours might be totally mundane like mine, or you might mix it up by working for an hour before you shower and dress. The important thing is to find a routine that works for you and step through it consistently. “The routine of physically getting ready for work is one of the most important things I did to make my week of working from home productive”, says Cameron, who leads an engineering group of more 250 people.

Get over your hang-ups around video conferencing

Many of us have scars from struggling with video calls in years past – the struggle was real. That may explain why people new to working from home, and their teammates in the office, are often skittish about vid chat. The good news is that now you can jump into a video call in a matter of seconds using Skype, Google Hangouts, Zoom, BlueJeans, or similar services.

“Being comfortable with quick video chats saves a lot of time compared to trading emails or instant messages,” says dev tools marketer Alyss. That face-to-face interaction also does wonders in terms of building relationships with co-workers. However, be prepared to coach your co-workers a little as they learn to embrace the impromptu video call. Their instinct will be to go find an empty conference room, which just wastes time.

If you walked over to their desk in person, you’d have the conversation right there and been done in under a minute. Nobody would think twice about distracting people at neighboring desks because ambient noise is just part of being in an office. Video calls should be treated the same way. Once my teammates got accustomed to that idea, it made working as a distributed team a lot easier.

And while we all want to present an aura of perfect professionalism, I encourage you not to stress about it overly much. There will be a time when the doorbell rings or your cat walks across your laptop, right in front of your camera. My kids sometimes pop into view on evening calls with people across the Pacific and I allow it because they seem to enjoy the extra glimpse into my world. (Your mileage may vary, of course, but we can all thank “the BBC guy” for breaking some serious ground on our behalf.)

And now, a few surprising things about working from home full-time

Although I felt I’d done my homework before going remote, there was still a lot to learn. If you’re considering going fully remote, take these tid-bits into account.

There’s a good chance your boss would rather keep you on as a remote worker than replace you. Recruiting, interviewing, and onboarding new employees is a lot of overhead. Many managers feel having an established teammate go remote is far less disruptive on the whole – especially if you’re crushing it lately.

Supporting remote employees is not trivial from an HR and tax perspective. In the U.S., a company must have a tax entity set up in every state in which they have a full-time employee. For this reason, many companies restrict full-time remote work to states where they already have offices. Benefits administration gets complicated because many insurance carriers operate regionally instead of nationally. And it’s just good business sense to adjust remote employees’ salaries to be in line with where they’re living. Figuring all this out takes time away from work HR could be doing that might benefit more people. So if you meet resistance from your employer about going remote, don’t assume they’re trying to be evil. They’re probably trying to be practical.

There are hidden costs to remote work. You’ll need the fastest, strongest internet connection money can buy. You’ll be paying for (and taking the time to procure) all your coffee, snacks, and meals. Your utility bill will go up because you’re no longer tuning the heat and/or air conditioning down during the day and you’re keeping more lights on. For most people, however, these new costs will be offset by the fact that you’re not gassing up the car or paying bus fare as often.

Sharing a workspace with a roommate or partner feels less isolated, but has its own challenges. My husband works remotely too, and when we moved, we made sure to buy a home with an office we can share. It was a great way to start the transition to remote work. Soon, however, he was working almost exclusively from his recliner. We could never agree on what temperature the room should be, and we both tend to be vocal participants in meetings. So now we work in separate rooms and send chat messages to each other even though we’re 50 feet apart. Which is kind of pathetic, but there it is.

Extroverts actually do quite well as remote workers. The key to staying in the loop and feeling connected when you’re the one remote member of your team is initiating communication. ABC, baby – always be communicating. We extroverts tend to do this instinctively anyway. Interpersonal interaction is our default setting. So we get a “two birds, one stone” synergy bonus.

Getting everyone to take the meeting via video is kind of awesome. When only one person joins remotely, it’s easy to (unintentionally) leave them out of the discussion and harder for them to contribute. But when everyone dials in, even if it’s from their desk at the office, we’re all in the same boat and on our best behavior. We raise our hands to speak. We wait until the other person is done talking before chiming in. We’re less likely to let one person dominate the conversation.

All-remote meetings + Halloween = good times.

Besides: you know who enjoys being the one giant head on the TV during meetings? Nobody.

This working from home thing isn’t for everybody

Although I’d love to tell you the WFH week was universally loved, it wasn’t. Max from marketing said it was “only the best week ever”, while Mary, a product owner, missed the higher level of social interaction and felt like the week was something she “just had to get through”. For others, it was a big empathy-builder. “Be mindful of our remote colleagues and how easy it is for them to feel (or be) left out,” says Adam from technical account management.

Your experience working from home will involve plenty of twists, turns, fails, and wins. Be patient as you and your team adjust, expect the unexpected, and just roll with it. At least you can rest easy knowing you won’t be the first remote worker whose toddler makes an unplanned cameo on international television.

This article appeared first on the Atlassian Blog.

Hate OKRs? Avoid these 7 mistakes

Sarah Goff-Dupont — Mon, 29 Jan 2018 15:58:53 +0000

The moment I heard it, my acronym allergy kicked in: OKRs. I’d done S.M.A.R.T. goals at another company, and they kind of sucked. Ditto for quarterly As & Os (accomplishments and objectives). Obviously, this OKRs thing was going to be more of the same.

And they did indeed kind of suck. We’d start working out OKRs for the next quarter with a full month left in the current quarter, so it felt like we were always in planning mode. Then all quarter long, I’d go down my checklist of KRs doing the same things I’d probably be doing anyway, wondering how that month of formalizing them wasn’t pointless overhead.

OKRs (“objectives and key results”) n. — Yet another corporate goal-setting framework.

The one thing OKRs had going for them was that people up the chain were setting high-level objectives, then leaving it to the people closest to the actual work (i.e., people like me) to decide exactly how we were going to contribute. That part totally makes sense, and I appreciate that level of autonomy.

Still, OKRs felt like a confusing and unnecessarily process-heavy way of shooting for the stars.

Then I realized I’d been doing them wrong in a bunch of ways. In fact, most of us were getting something about OKRs wrong. No wonder it was confusing. Long story short, we straightened ourselves out and now OKRs are actually fruitful — I’ll show you some real-life examples below.

If you hate OKRs, you owe it to yourself to at least make sure you’re doing them right (seeing as you probably have to do them anyway, rage notwithstanding). Below is a list of mistakes that were running rampant around, plus a couple bonus anti-patterns you should be aware of.

Full disclosure: we haven’t eliminated all of them. Yet.

The ABCs of OKRs

If you’re already familiar with the basics, skip to the mistakes below. But for the uninitiated… Objectives and key results (OKRs) is a framework for setting goals, typically on a quarterly basis. Your team sets 3–5 high-level goals (objectives) to pursue, along with 2–3 success measures you’ll use to determine whether you’ve reached it (key results).

At the end of the quarter, you score each KR on a sliding scale from 0 to 1 (0 = no progress at all; 1 = you hit or exceeded your target; .1-.9 = somewhere in between). During the quarter, you check in and predict what the final score will likely be, based on how you’re tracking so far. This keeps OKRs fresh in your mind and serves as an early detection system for OKRs that might need some extra attention.

Mistake #1: Confusing Themes with Objectives

“Ecosystem” isn’t a helpful objective. Neither is “customer experience.” They don’t say much about what you’re trying to achieve or where you want to go. They’re nice themes, sure. But they’re not really goals.

Instead, write your objectives such that you can look back later and see clearly whether you met it or not.

One of our design team’s objectives is, “Improve our craft, velocity, and quality of design decisions.” They paired it with KRs like “50% of product releases have a passing UX scorecard” (I don’t know what a UX scorecard is, but I trust our design team does).

Mistake #2: Writing All Your Things as OKRs

Your KRs shouldn’t be an exhaustive list of every single thing you and your team are doing. Stuff that falls into the “business as usual” category like fixing bugs or closing out the quarterly books doesn’t need to be there.

If your objective is to change the way in which you go about business as usual, that might be worth including — “Improve turnaround time on customer-reported bugs” or “Reduce late expense report submissions by 20%.”

OKRs are your highest priority items, and “just enough” is enough. FWIW, I’m a senior-level individual contributor and I typically own 1–3 KRs each quarter.

Mistake #3: Confusing KRs with Tasks

For a long time, I wrote my KRs as nothing more than a to-do list. Check ’em off when they’re done, score ’em all a 1 (more on that in a moment), and call it a day. Satisfying, sure…but again: formalizing my tasks as KRs just felt like busy work. Plus, there were times when, halfway through the quarter, I realized the task wouldn’t get me closer to the objective. “But it’s a KR! I’m honor-bound to follow through on it!” Ugh.

My lightbulb moment was when I got hip to the fact that the “R” stands for “result.” (Duhhh.)

So instead of saying “Publish 3 blog posts related to the Team Playbook,” I started saying “Increase traffic to Playbook-related posts by 15%.” How I get that 15% increase is flexible. I could promote old posts, optimize them for search, publish new stuff, or some combination thereof. Also, getting to a 15% increase feels like a juicy challenge. (‘Cuz honestly, I could churn out 3 posts in my sleep. They’d get crap results, but I could do it.)

Think outcomes — not output.

Mistake #4: Scoring KRs by Gut-Feel

You may have seen KRs like, “Better customer engagement.” How could you even score that?? It’s super subjective, and therefore meaningless in the context of goal-setting.

When you phrase KRs as a measurable result, however, they’re easy to score. Just do the math. Going back to my, “Increase traffic to Playbook-related posts by 15%” KR above, let’s say I manage to increase traffic to my blog posts by only 5%. I divide 5 by 15 and boom: my score for that KR is .3 (roughly).

Objectives, on the other hand, are often articulated such that you can’t score them objectively. But that’s actually ok. Take the average of all the KR scores rolling up into it, and you’ve got your O score.

Mistake #5: Scoring KRs on the Wrong Scale

There’s this famous preso from Google about OKRs that talks about how a score of .7 is considered good. That led to some confusion on our team as to whether you score your KR a .7 vs a 1 if you hit your stated target. (The argument being that scoring it a .7 leaves room for you to exceed it and “get credit” for over-achieving.)

Here’s the deal. If you hit your KR’s target, you score it a 1. At least, that’s how Google does it. If you exceed your target, you still score it a 1 — and think about setting a more ambitious target next time. Which leads me to…

Mistake #6: Consistently Scoring 1s on Every OKR

The reason a .7 is considered good is that your stated targets are supposed to be really frikking hard to hit. If you’re nailing them most of the time, you’re not stretching yourself. Or, your KRs are actually just tasks (see above) that get a binary 0 or 1 score. Maybe it’s both.

My team once set a KR of doubling SEO-based traffic to one of our microsites, which, honestly, felt like a pipe-dream. But lo n’ behold, we did it! And we learned a ton along the way, which wouldn’t have happened if we’d set a target we could’ve sleepwalked to. This was my other lightbulb moment.

Mistake #7: Doggedly Pursuing a Bogus OKR

Don’t keep chipping away at a rock if it’s the wrong rock. Things change, new information comes to light, etc. It’s ok to remove or abandon an OKR if you no longer believe it’s the right thing to do. Score it a 0, and replace it with one that is right.

An important aspect of OKRs is that zeros are not punishable. (If they are, then you’re really doing it wrong.) Instead, zeros should prompt questions. Why did we miss so badly? Why was this the wrong goal? How can we set a better goal next quarter? If you learn something from your zero, you haven’t wasted your time.

It’s OK to hate OKRs… but I don’t (anymore)

After a few quarters of doing OKRs the way they’re supposed to be done (or close to it), I generally feel more focused. It’s easy to figure out what I should be working on at any given point in the quarter. And if someone requests additional work from me, I can weigh it against OKR-related work and give them a yes/no answer quickly.

I also feel more connected to the work people around me are doing (and being a remote employee, that’s doubly important). My teammates and I often own individual KRs that feed into a common objective, which gets us sharing info and ideas more than we used to.

As a bonus, getting comfortable with setting stretch goals keeps me from wallowing in mediocrity. Complacency is a career-killer, and I’ve got too many years before retiring to rest on my laurels just yet.

So yeah: I’ve gone from OKR hater to born-again OKRs booster. Which makes me wonder what else in my life seems kinda sucky …but only because I’m doing it wrong.