Essentials of Remote Design Team Management and Collaboration

How to effectively devise a strategy of remote team building and management with special focus on experience and design team; as well as

maintain the team motivation and software tools that you may use.

Coronavirus is affecting the way global industries operate and design industry isn’t any exception. Lockdown, social distancing rules and office closures have made many companies have to move to working in distributed mode. This requires experience and design managers to adopt remote management.

Remote work can be challenging to many leads and managers if effective communication and collaboration protocols aren’t effectively in place. And its not something that can be adopted overnight. In traditional office settings, team members can be physically present and can establish direct communication; that is fast, interactive and easy. Remote work doesn’t automatically create this feeling of shared responsibility and accountability and its can often be difficult to maintain open and quick communication.

In this article, I am going to recommend some strategies that design managers and team can establish in order to effectively run their day to day distributed operations in a much more effective fashion. These remote work strategies, collaboration and communication tools are designed to mitigate the difficulties and challenges of remote work while enabling the team to produce exceptional results.

A. Devise an effective communication protocol

Remote teams often struggle with miscommunication because team members are often working in silos. That’s why the success of experience designer depends on how well they can communicate design decisions to other people involved in the process.

This involves striking a balance between over-communication and not communicating enough when it comes to remote collaboration.

Here are a few rules a project manager needs to follow to ensure that team members have all the essential information they need to do their work:

1. Communicate often throughout the day. It's important to establish regular touch points during the day for the whole team to share updates, such as morning standup, optional mid day sync and end of day sync. Those syncs are an opportunity to discuss blockers to progress, figure out solutions, and remain aligned on the team’s priorities.

2. Document everything. Documenting is the key – if you want to be effective at communicating when you work remotely, make sure that you document everything. Make sure to use cloud based documenting tools instead.

3. Schedule design reviews. Schedule regular design reviews to make sure you’re moving in the right direction as a team.

4. Have regular 1:1 meeting(s). Video chats are a good way to maintain regular contact with your teammates. You will gain insight into what everyone is working on and how they’re progressing and make sure to document them.

5. Establish feedback boundaries. Know what sort of feedback you want to get. Are you looking for insights on visual design decisions, or do you want to focus more on information architecture? This knowledge will help you to formulate questions and drive a more focused, impactful discussion.

6. Invite right amount of people. Make sure to invite only those who are required and can add values or need to be kept updated for the specific type of work that you will be discussing or reviewing.

7. Use effective communication tools. Use Slack, Microsoft teams etc. for 1 one 1 or group chats. You can also create channels for targeted discussion. Teams, Zoom (although zoom may have security flaws), Skype etc., are good for stand ups or daily sync ups. Use email less often as email is difficult to track and manage.

8. Annotate your designs. Leave comments next to sections where you’d like to provide guidelines to other designers or developers. It will be easier for others to understand the rationale behind individual design decisions.

B. Plan well and maintain project transparency

Remote work and management requires better planning than usual. Unless planned right, it may lead to project delays, confusion and misalignment. Following are the few measures you can take to avoid those.

1. Create a project backlog. It is important to make sure that all the tasks of team members are put into the project management software that you are using. It can be software like Jira. Missing tasks can also be added at a later date. Make sure to identify major tasks (often called as ‘user stories’) and break them down into smaller tasks. Once done, you need to prioritize them, estimate them and set deadlines for each one and finally assign them to the team members. This will help you to track, evaluate and measure progress in a much better fashion.

2. Create a proper roadmap. Team members produce great work when every team member knows what they are supposed to do and when. This is crucial for successful remote work. So its important to have a clear product roadmap for team members to clearly understand their deliverables, roles and responsibilities.

3. Use Gantt chart. Gantt chart makes all the tasks clear and brings visibility to every team member. It also helps them to visualize the complete project plan and priorities and identify roadblocks.

4. Keep the meetings short and effective. Long and frequent meetings are often the norm of remote work and can be the source of huge time and resource wastage. To alleviate these issues, you need to do the following: a. Plan the meetings in advance. For example: weekly status meetings, bi weekly walkthroughs, sprint demos etc. b. Designate a team member for each meeting who can take the ownership of conducting those meetings and the outcomes. c. Set the agenda very clear. d. Time box every item in the agenda. e. Specify the desired outcomes .

5. Arrange Milestone reviews. Milestones are significant events that occur during the product design process. A milestone can be the completion of a particular feature or visual design phase, for example. In an agile environment, milestone reviews can be done at the end of each sprint.

6. Devise an effective on-boarding process. Use the on-boarding process to familiarize the new employee with your company’s communication tools from the very beginning. When you onboard new member or new employee to your project, make sure to debrief them well along with summaries to read and share a document with key project detail that may include team members with designation and contact detail, project brief, location of the key documents, software tools and project plan etc.

C. Have some fun too

Remember the fun time you and your team members used to have? Time you guys used to spend together during lunch hours, coffee breaks or even playing prank or picking on each other was golden and was great for building bonds. Those bonds are valuable motivational pieces that brings the team together and are invaluable parts of successful team work. Now major parts of those are gone missing because we are socially distant.

So here are few steps you can take to build and rebuild those bonds. Just make sure that these aren’t set as mandatory and rather optional to participate.

1. Organize some virtual team lunch. You can plan out weekly lunch time with team mates. Or even once in a while allocate some project budget to order lunch for them through the food delivery apps.

2. Arrange coffee and catch up. You can do it every morning before the stand up. That will set the tone for the day and prepare the team for the day.

3. Organize team yoga or some fitness challenge. You assign this task to one or more of your team members and that will ensure some physical activities and fun too.

4. Virtual lunch and learn. You can set up webinars or online meetings where your team members can present something they have learnt or share their achievements. This could very well be some kind of show and tell where you can invite people from other teams to present their recent work and share their stories.

5. And celebrate. Celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, achievements etc.

D. Make good uses of software tools

Software tools can go a long way assisting the remote work in every phase. The tools you choose will depend on your organization’s needs, but here is a list of software that I want to recommend for different types of remote work delivery and management.

1. Project management tools. Task management or project management tools are essential for tracking progress especially when working remotely. Some recommended software are: Jira, Basecamp, Monday.com, Trello, Asana etc.

2. Messaging systems. Team messaging systems like Slack are good for posting product updates and questions. Other options are Microsoft Teams, Skype etc.

3. Video conferencing tools. Important, complicated, or controversial feedback should be communicated through video and voice chat instead of just messaging or email. Google Hangouts, Zoom, and Skype allow you to have video calls while sharing your screens to collaborate on your design.

4. Virtual whiteboards. Virtual whiteboards allow remote team members to collaborate and give a sense of team work. Doing remote design is a challenge because you can’t just draw something on a physical whiteboard so everyone can see it. Thankfully, modern tools allow you to replicate this approach online. Mural and Miro are great online whiteboards that are designed for better team collaboration.

5. Prototyping tools. InVision and AdobeXD can be used to create prototype that allows designers and reviewers to annotate and provide feedback.

6. Cloud storage and version management. Tools like Abstract or Sympli will help you share files with multiple team members and ensures that everyone has access to the most up-to-date files by providing version control and the ability to see change history. You can also consider Google drive, MS One drive, Box etc.

7. Office tools. Cloud based office tools like Google docs/sheets, Office 365 etc., can be used as replacement of conventional MS Office.

Effective remote work infrastructure is a sign of the maturity of an organization, and the work of a good manager. It is highly anticipated that post Covid-19 world will continue to see the rise of remote work teams. By establishing the proper tools, processes, and infrastructure that support remote management, you’ll not only set up your organization for success, but potentially the rest of your career as a design manager.

Please let me know what you think and if you would like to add any missing points. Thank you.