The Remote Agility Framework team events provide techniques to maximise the value of remote events by communicating and collaborating asynchronously and synchronously using best of breed tooling and emerging remote working practices.
Digital Tools: Tool the F up by identifying the right tool to conduct team events from all the digital tools available.
Ensure upfront that all participants have access and understand how to use each tool.
Setting aside time to build team tool literacy will increase session efficiency and effectiveness.
Remote Team Alliance: Establish the working agreement and environment for the team.
Address the basic rules of remote events such as the use of digital tools to facilitate the event. Otherwise, agree on the rules of the event at the beginning of the session.
Understand the power imbalance created by hybrid remote/onsite events. Hybrid remote/onsite events are not recommended, go fully remote instead.
Facilitation: Keep events short, sharp and on point.
Create a clear agenda, reduce the session length to no more than 2-hours and promote asynchronous options to contain audience numbers.
Include frequent breaks and activities that re-engage participants.
When facilitating a remote event the pains and dysfunctions of a fully co-located event are amplified by distance. The remote:af event canvas assists you in evaluating and re-establishing any event in a remote context.
Through the clarification of the event's purpose, outcomes and intended audience it enables a team to consider the tooling and requirements for remote working and appropriately prepare for an event.
Optimise productivity whilst effectively delivering value to your customers and the business.
Operating Cadence: The remote:af Team Planning occurs at the start of each increment, monthly at a minimum.
Shorter planning cycles lead to faster feedback and the ability to adapt to changes in the environment rapidly.
Backlog Refinement and Prioritisation: Ensure your team has a refined backlog of work that is sufficiently understood by the team, including interdependencies and complexity.
Ensure that there is a clear understanding of the priority of work to be selected during planning.
It’s best to keep the time between refinement and planning small to reduce the risk of divergence. Backlog refinement helps to de-risk planning.
Event Setup: Make sure you have your backlog prioritised and past incremental data gathered to enable your team to plan.
Agreed Objectives: The key is to ensure everyone on the team has a voice.
Introducing the business objectives to be achieved in the upcoming increment, the team collaboratively agrees on the increment goals, and forecasts the work required to achieve the objectives.
Sequence the Work: Team collaboratively identifies the work from the refined backlog and forecasts what to achieve in the increment based on their perception of the size and complexity the work and historical performance data.
Business Value: Team articulates the business value that would be delivered and where possible the return on investment.
Plan: Team creates a plan on how to deliver on its forecast for the next increment.
Data captured from previous increments enables the team to make informed decisions on the amount of work they can complete while preserving a sustainable pace based on the team's capacity.
Team Confidence: At the conclusion of planning the team votes on their confidence in achieving the plan.
This creates an opportunity for the team to raise risks, hidden concerns, impediments, dependencies and opportunities.
Publish and Radiate: Visualise the plan and make it available to those key to the team to ensure transparency.
Leaders are more informed to provide the right support.
Hold open reviews of work, demonstrating the team’s activity and providing transparency of the value-added.
Operating Cadence: The remote:af Team Review occurs at the end of each increment, monthly at a minimum.
A shorter cycle leads to faster feedback but carries a transaction cost.
Gather Data: Identify the right tool to record and share team reviews asynchronously with stakeholders.
Enabling stakeholders to leave feedback allows the team to focus the review on synthesising any new feedback.
Team must collect different types of data e.g. feedback, measures, experiential feedback, and Improvement action results.
Attendance: Identify key stakeholders to attend synchronously and those that can be asynchronous. Participants who attend should have both influence and interest.
Review Data: The remote:af Team Review is to discuss the demonstrated features and value with stakeholders, and clarify data and asynchronous feedback that has been provided.
Business Value: Team validates alignment with customer and stakeholder expectations.
Agreed Actions: Team agrees on any realignment actions to add to their backlog for consideration for next increment.
Celebrate: The remote:af Team Review is the time for the team to reflect on what has been achieved and celebrate success before kicking off the next increment.
Recorded Review: Publish recordings in a library and communicate out to stakeholders and the broader organisation. Information distributed must be in alignment with company policies.
By prioritising transparency the team builds trust with the organisation.
Publish and Radiate: Teams need to be transparent and radiate out agreed actions.
Any actions are added to the team backlog.
Teams focus on continuous improvement, constantly evolving the way they work.
Operating Cadence: Teams spend an appropriate amount of time retrospecting on their work, optimising their system of work and reviewing the remote:af Team Alliance.
Digital Tools: Make the tool available to capture asynchronous feedback before the session to reduce VC time.
Data Gathering: The remote:af Team Retrospective focuses on data informed improvements.
To maximise the value of the retrospective we capture all data through automation or asynchronously.
We use a variety of data sources e.g. feedback, metrics and measures, experiential feedback, and Improvement action results.
Psychological safety: Be empathetic towards your team members and consider how feedback can be approached when not directly face to face with the recipient.
Team Exploration: Team synchronously explores data and feedback to understand the root cause of problems and impediments and design improvement experiments.
Collaboration: Team has the opportunity to contribute observations or insights based on the data available and agree collectively on the improvement experiments to be taken.
Agreed Improvement Actions: Team has agreed on actions to add to their backlog and for consideration include in backlog refinement for next increment.
An agreed improvement action is not just a sentence from the retrospective.
Continuous Improvement: Actions are in the form of disprovable hypotheses and direct backlog items.
For each increment, at minimum one improvement experiment should be undertaken.
Publish and Radiate: Teams need to be transparent and radiate out the improvements they have implemented reflecting a growth mindset to continuously improve.
“Remote AF”, “RAF” and associated trade marks are trade marks of Remote Agility Framework Pty Ltd used under licence by Remote AF Co Pty Ltd.
© Remote Agility Framework Pty Ltd. Used under licence by Remote AF Co Pty Ltd.
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