Some thoughts on remote Project working.

March 2020 changed the way we interact and work, possibly forever. The global coronavirus pandemic  forced businesses of all shapes and sizes to adapt to remote working or close. 

When this happened I was fortunate to be  working as a contract Project Manager at a Russell Group University, in the division responsible for the various online systems that support teaching (virtual learning environments, virtual classrooms, online exams, recorded media repository etc). The University's bread and butter is traditional face to face, on-campus teaching. With five main campuses and many, many more  buildings scattered across the city including multiple libraries, research centres, a teaching hospital and a teaching veterinary hospital, connectivity is something the University is very good at. They also have a mature online degree programme and recently launched the first fully online MicroMasters. From mid-March 2020 all staff were required to work from home, and teaching and assessment moved fully online immediately.  

I've been a fan of remote working since the mid-2000s when I managed a dispersed team of 20 while working at NHS Education for Scotland. We had an office base but the team was scattered across the globe with people in the USA, Spain, India and Iceland at different times of year.  Communication had to continue  whether I was in the office, at home, in London, Birmingham, Aberdeen or Malta;  every week was different. Whether someone was at home or in the office, they were included in communication and meetings through an online daily 15-minute stand-up and instant messaging. Following the advice of a superb development manager we tried to keep all meetings short, using instant messaging for most things. Working with developers and other techy-types helped... the old adage of developers sitting in dark rooms with only their pet mouse for company was pretty accurate. They embraced new technology and had no fear of online meetings, planning poker and instant messaging. 

Back to the University...I had already used Microsoft Teams for a project in 2019 and liked the integrated meeting and file storage functionality; when you set up a new Team, you automatically get a SharePoint site in the background to store shared documents and you can add things like a Planner (Kanban board) for task management. Yes, there are issues but that's for another day. Version control is straightforward, meetings can be recorded and the meeting 'chat' is sticky. When the University moved fully online I already knew the Teams interface so the move wasn't difficult for me personally.

 Online working...the difficult bits and how to avoid them

• Mixed media

​ When you have eight people in a meeting room looking at a large screen, and one on the phone or a video link, it's just not the same. When everyone is working remotely, everyone is equal. When we return to the office, it's likely that there will still be some people working from home so   pick your  medium. If one person is remote, ask everyone to join remotely.  Then everyone is present as they would be in the room. Even if it's just a voice meeting with no video, you can still interact, you can see who is speaking and who is waiting to speak and you can include a chat window to capture comments that aren't noticed or heard, or that you want to share with everyone.  You also save on meeting room space.

• Version control

Emailing attachments to a big group asking for comments is really difficult to manage. You have no idea who has read what you send, and have you ever tried consolidating multiple word documents with tracked changes and comments scattered throughout? An almost impossible task unless you have a fantastic administrator with nothing better to do. Use the technology  to manage this; use a cloud storage solution and send links instead. SharePoint and similar let you see not only who has opened a document but what edits have been made. and when, allowing you to revert easily if needed. 

• Meeting overload

Check diaries before you arrange a meeting and give people a few minutes to switch from one meeting to the next. When you don't have the few minutes to walk to a new meeting room, add this in so people can prepare, go to the loo or grab a drink.

• Don't stop

​Whether you use whiteboards, flipharts, kanban boards or just pen and paper, find an online alternative to do the same thing.  Some communications platforms have built-in integrations, you just have to explore a little to find them. If not, a quick search will uncover a plethora of options many of which will be open source and / or free. 

• Manage notifications

It can be difficult to keep track if all information appears on your screen and you don't have control over what appears when. If you keep notifications on for everything, the sheer volume can be overwhelming.  Simple changes such as muting notifications for conversations you don't need to read till later, or changing your status to 'busy' can help avoid information overload.  Block out time in your diary when you need time to concentrate  and turn off notifications if you can.

​I've found communication within project teams has been even better while we have all been working at home. Ad hoc questions can be posted to a group and as long as everyone manages their own notifications they can contribute, view later or ignore. Once we begin to return to physical workplaces I hope remote working will no longer be seen as second best. 

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