 Hi everyone, today you're going to hear from an expert panel of four who are going to give you their tips, tricks and inside hacks on how to run remote design sprints. Remote design sprints are always a hot topic, but the big challenge is how to run them well. Today's small webinar gives you an inside track on the practical and valuable how to get them right. If you have any questions about how to run remote design sprints or you've got some resources and guides that others might find useful, just put it in the comments and we'll do our best to either answer your questions or share your tips and resources. Let's dive right in now and hear from our four fantastic experts, Wout, Anna, Tim and Robert who've generously given up their time and some of their resources. Today's video is quite a long video, but it's designed to give you as much practical knowledge that you can use straight away in one spot. So let's dive right in and hear what the experts have to say. Welcome to today's webinar. Apologies for my cranky voice, but today's webinar is incredibly important and we felt at AJ & Smart that it was better to do it and well than not at all because this webinar is about remote sprints and we have a lot of our sprint community based in Asia-Pacific right now who are grounded with travel bans and they're reaching out to us asking for help on how they can run remote sprints, what are they and how do they run them successfully. And I have great pleasure in being joined today by an expert panel on remote sprints who are going to share with us the inside tips and tricks on getting the most out of a remote sprint and when best to use them. So I'm going to allow each of our panel members today to introduce themselves and then we'll get stuck into the question straight away to provide you some practical value really quickly. So I'll start with right with Anna if you could just introduce yourself Anna and let the viewers know where you're from. Thank you Sarah. First thing first, I would like to congratulate everyone here. I think this is a really great initiative. I'm really excited to be part of this panel and I'm looking forward to learn from everyone and share some of my experiences. So I'm Anna I do product design a strategy and I guess that almost three years ago I joined forces with my life and business partner Raz and we created just mad. Now a lot of people don't know that our name is actually an acronym and stands for just make a difference. So we're a bit mad but we also are trying to make a difference in the world. So yeah we are a product innovation consultancy and we work with a large variety of companies no matter how small or how big we help them innovate better and faster. And most of our work is delivered through workshops and we found out to be very efficient and effective 90% of our clients are remote. We were remote from day one. So I guess I'm really excited to share some of the insights that I have about design sprints and how to make them work remotely. Fantastic. And if I could introduce Robert now. Hello everybody. My name is Robert Scrobe. I am the person behind the global virtual design sprints. I'm basically versed in specialized in virtual design sprints or virtual work. My background is wide and varied. I was a former DJ. I own companies. I've worked in agencies. Primarily my focus these days are getting distributed teams to think about their work in a virtual space rather than remote and there is a we'll get into that in a bit. But yeah that's primarily what I do. Beyond that I'm pretty active in the overall design sprint community. I do a lot of professional development and consulting in the space. And beyond that I have a little dog here that's trying to sleep so hopefully I'm not going to speak too loud. But that's essentially what I'm all about. And Tim can we hear from you from the agent smart team. Hey everyone. My name is Tim Hoover. I'm part of the agent smart consulting team. I have been running design sprints since 2017. And yeah since then we've also experimented with remote sprints. But most of our sprints are happening in person so I think it's really really interesting to have all your different perspectives on running remote sprints as well. Yeah and I'm really looking forward to spend time with you and talk about remote sprints. Fantastic. So and lastly Wout, welcome Wout. Perhaps you could give us a little background about you. Yes thank you very much Sarah. My name is Wout Hermans. I'm working for Mural based out of Amsterdam. What you see behind me is my living room here in Amsterdam. My team at Mural is largely remote. So I'm the only one in Amsterdam. Most of my colleagues are on the other side of the world. As you might know Mural is a visual collaboration tool. But we try to be more than a tool because a tool is just a tool right. You need to have like the way like how to work with that. So we're also really big on like services and consulting and helping people. Yeah do visual collaboration, do remote visual collaboration. So I'm super excited to be part of this panel and share some of our experience but also definitely to learn from the others. That's great thanks Wout. So I think we'll get stuck right in and try to maximise as much of this hour as possible focusing on the solutions for viewers. I'm going to start by asking Robert. What is the difference between a remote sprint and an in-person sprint? Because they're very different animals. And I think it'd be useful just to set the scene upfront about obviously people out in the room. But what are the other challenges that sit around a remote sprint versus an in-person sprint? How are they different in terms of the leaders? I'll kind of expand that question also to include virtual because there are three distinct modes of doing design sprints. The in-person one is one we're all familiar with where everyone kind of gathers in the same physical space. Kind of works through different activities related to design sprints. Maybe it's a four or five day it could be a modification of it but essentially you're all in the same place. Remote is the idea that you're doing a design sprint with a distributed team of people. Now they can be a group of people in one location whereas you have one or two satellite connectors in other countries in different time zones and you have to kind of work out the logistics of that. But that's typically what involves a remote design sprint. A virtual design sprint is unique in the sense that everyone is on their own screen. That's by default what everyone comes to as a platform so that everyone is on the same page and on the same kind of mode. The challenges inherent with all three of them primarily depend on context and personnel and also connectivity. More so for the virtual and remote aspects. Connectivity and functionality and digital understanding of the tools are huge. In person it's more or less the dynamics in the realm of power dynamics that go into some of the key stakeholders that may or may not be present. Overall though where I usually center is for virtual because the inherent advantages are that you can record pretty much everything. You can leverage tools like mural to facilitate a lot of the kind of ideation aspects of the process as well as sharing. I've used mural exclusively now for I guess about a year and a half, two years and it's been really successful for us. For remote sprints that's usually the bridge for companies that are used to doing them in person where you don't necessarily go completely into the remote world of doing design sprints there but you kind of cascade or transition into. The biggest challenge there is the communication really and keeping people's attention when you're doing a design sprint in that aspect. So I think that would be a really high level of review of all three choices that you could have for design sprints these days. Fantastic that's great Robert that's a good introduction. So it's interesting to see that there's three actual perspectives and I think Tim you might agree we tend to run a combination and are required to run remote aspects. It's more of a remote than a full virtual. I would say it's a mix of virtual and remote. I mean it's really interesting to hear this distinction because I've actually never really thought about that distinction in that way but I think Robert is I mean that is exactly right. So these kind of like three different modes of running a sprint. I mean like for us calling it remote sprint basically means doing a virtual sprint with people sitting in front of their laptop but it's true. I mean for a lot of corporates that are globally distributed it's going to be something that is kind of like a mix of in person with really conferencing with another team. This is something that we usually don't do so it's either in person or virtual slash remote. Depending on the kind of workshop we're running. I mean we're also doing like these iteration workshops that are you know like a little bit lighter on you know like the demands on the facilitator as well. So I think in these cases sometimes it's also possible to do a lot of the work remotely without relying too much on a virtual tool but it's true. I mean the amount of preparation that would usually go into a sprint it just changes dramatically once you introduce a virtual tool and you have to make sure that everything works perfectly for every person especially when you're not working with you know like a tech startup or a young company that is used to you know like basically using every tool at their disposal when you're working with more established industrial companies very often you have issues that like for one they cannot access the tools or they don't have a webcam, they don't have a microphone on their computer so all of these issues are things that we encountered ourselves and we pretty much learned by you know like trying as many things as possible and also running into these problems so that we could improve it the next time. Yeah but it's really interesting to hear this distinction of you know like in person, remote and virtual because I think it makes a lot of sense. We're going to adopt it now Tim. Yeah that's the benchmark, thanks Robert. And Anna, do you have anything to add to that in terms of differentiating between remote versus virtual? Anna maybe I could hear from you. I guess thank you Robert for that perspective, I guess that as Tim mentioned it's really interesting for us to hear a fresh perspective for us as an agency we always look at them as remote sprints. I guess that design sprints are hard enough in person and even more so remote with distributed teams and to me the key of successfully run a design sprint remotely is actually a combination of tree elements, its preparation, tools and facilitation but I guess that the first one plays much bigger role. In my opinion I guess that 80% of the success of a remote design sprint is dictated by preparation and I'll explain why. So my first ever remote facilitation experience was kind of a disaster because I worked with this client from New York, he was pretty open to the process but I tried to replicate the in person version with an online version so it was obviously a bad idea. I guess that there are so many differences that you have to take into account but after running dozens of remote sprints we came up with our own recipe or how to do it by our book. The main challenges that we have faced over time is that obviously time zone differences and availability, low engagement. So you have to make it more interesting for them because you're not going to be in the same room with them, you're not going to feel the energy and then obviously even if you are in 2020 we still have tech related issues almost every call starts with can you hear me, can you see me, is this working? Yeah this still happens, so this is an evergreen problem you have to consider that and then there's also the problem of ineffective collaboration due to poor communication. I can tell you that preparation is crucial and I cannot stress enough the best way to ruin a sprint even before starting it is neglecting the stage especially when it's online. I know that the sprint is meant to accelerate ideation prototyping and testing and while some might consider that pre-sprint work is counter-intuitive or unnecessary but based on our experience doing prep work is crucial. For us it's just impossible just to start let's say if we have a conversation with the client today it's quite challenging for us to start the sprint on Monday because we usually take two weeks of prep work just to understand the challenge we understand the team and their processes plus dynamics and sometimes even politics we have to understand their expectations so before running the sprint we always have one or two weeks to do proper problem framing so once we know that we have a design sprint that is going to happen we get familiar with the challenge at hand so we talk to key stakeholders and we find who is responsible for what and then we try to understand what impact they have on the problem for problem framing we use an interesting formula it's called a bump formula so we look at the challenge from four perspectives so it's business, user, market and product we try to get as much information as we can around those and once we have enough research around the challenge we're putting together a sprint brief we send it out to everyone and I guess that sending a sprint to everyone will help them to get aligned all participants to get aligned and understand what to expect from the upcoming sprint we usually include the challenge, outline, schedule, time frame as well as a checklist, things to do I guess that gives them a better understanding what to expect we are very picky when it comes to assembling the team because we want to make sure that we have the right people we had cases in which we had to have a conversation with 12 or 15 stakeholders because they all had something interesting to say or to add but we always stick to five or seven people to bring them in because even though it's remote or virtual we try to limit the number of participants just to have control over what happens scheduling again plays a super crucial role here you don't want to schedule calls at 5am in the morning or 11 o'clock in the evening I guess that we had this example with this client from Australia in that case we had to make, let's say, we had to make it work for them and we had to wake up a bit early but you want to make sure that you're accommodating everyone and you're not being too harsh with the hour we tried to fit participants in a nine hour window it's also important to let people know when you'll deem them and for how long because we have a combination of synchronous and asynchronous meetings and we always, always make sure that we have preparatory calls with everyone and we have actually individual mini trainings with all participants because we have learned that there's a certain learning curve for the tool that we're using in our case is Mural and we neglected this in our early design sprints and we realized that there are some people that do not know how to use it and they're not very familiar so you have to extract yourself from the bubble that you live in and understand that not everyone is a designer not everyone works with product and you have to accommodate those and make sure that they understand what they have to do and how to do it Very comprehensive Thanks, Anna One of the things that's just come up recently and quite topically for us on our LinkedIn channel is preparedness in terms of understanding cultural and organizational norms in particularly the role of the decider In your preparedness, Anna, how much do you take into account and prepare for in either your mini trainings or you're onboarding the cultural and organizational values when it comes to remote sprints I think culture plays an important role in every single organization and in a company that everyone is aligned goals are very clear, initiatives are welcomed from everyone there's a streamlined process Obviously things tend to go smooth but I guess another important aspect here is psychological safety I know this is a fancy word that a lot of teams use more and more often but it's actually true if you have a culture around experimentation if you feel safe to fail well, at least up to a certain extent I guess that having this culture towards experimentation this is an environment that will embrace a process like the sprint and even more so running it in a remote environment if there's no culture around that and the company is still young in exploring and understanding the benefits of the process and the benefits of remote work, I guess in general there's a huge opportunity for us to educate these companies and showcase the benefits because I strongly believe that nowadays there are a lot of teams that focus more on the outputs rather than the outcomes we often see this culture of getting things done but not necessarily the right things I strongly believe it's in our hands and it's our responsibility to shed some light and explain the benefits and help them level up Tim, I could hear from you or Robert around your preparedness how do you actually, Robert, how do you help prepare well and get that very first element right for remote sprints what advice have you got for viewers in terms of specific inside tricks for preparing well for a remote sprint the two things I always recommend to the clients I consult are beyond kind of giving a canvas of everything they need to know is figuring out who you need to speak to in a one-on-one capacity sometimes people won't voice their discomfort or their objections to work in remote or remote sprints or the design sprint process but they will speak to other people that they know chances are a lot comes out in those conversations that will enlighten you to allow what Anna is talking about what their hesitations are, are they unfamiliar with the tech are they unfamiliar with the process do they have concerns in relation to something that's happening in parallel to what you're doing are they concerned about outcomes if you get a hold of those conversations early they don't manifest into issues that suddenly appear within your sprint or within your design sprint I'm not saying you have to do one-on-ones with 30 to 50 people that's a little unrealistic but what you can do is do small groups especially if they're siloed teams in an organization that are being called into the sprint it really helps to get perspective and then they feel like you have not only ownership of their issues but you can actually empower them and the situation to improve upon itself that would be the first one the other is to utilize video in this day and age you have the ability to reach out and communicate directly with a lot of your audiences there's nothing to say that you couldn't use something like Loom on your browser and fire up mural and walk through exactly what you're looking to have them do within a process or to explain how to use a tool sometimes the I see people send over links that are coming from like say you know zoom or mural or any other tool that the team would use to understand how to use it but chances are no one has time to look at those however if it's coming from you and it's curated and personalized to understand it there may be an outside chance to look at it but they may have no time and just come to your sprint wanting to just work and is expecting you to explain it as is but those are the two I recommend first is to if you have the kind of like the runway to do so make sure you take time to meet individual stakeholders or individual team members or one-on-ones or in small groups and kind of figure out what they're most concerned about and what they're after and the second is to start recording what you know and putting that into some sort of consumable form whether it's on mobile primarily or if you want to do on desktop that's fine too but have a repository for Q&A and use those videos so that people can consume them on their own time in my experience especially if they've never worked with something like Mural to come on board and figure out what they're going to do when they're in session Tim do you have anything to add there in terms of preparedness? Yeah right I mean so I would agree with everything that was just said I mean the one thing I think that's key in every design sprint is expectation management and this becomes so much more important when you don't actually have the people in the same room so design sprint should be really aware of that so in my view there are actually two learning curves so for the participant it's being exposed to a completely new process and even though the facilitator guides them through it it's still even in an in-person workshop it's still often feels very strange and weird and you know like the facilitator is really there to guide people through it and build this level of trust and kind of like lacking this interpersonal dynamic in a remote or virtual setting you have this additional learning curve of having a tool kind of like in between the different participants and I think this is why we also started doing preparatory one-on-one calls with every sprint participant so we're doing this for like the normal in-person sprints but with a remote or virtual sprint there is this added component of actually setting up the tech with these people and this is usually when we are already identifying problems that might come up in the workshop for example when you're working with a client from China for example like will their internet connection work I mean very often these people are using a VPN they are very commonly used for Western or American clients just cannot be accessed so in that case you just need to find out what can we use instead and I think having extra time to test that and just make sure that everything runs smooth will really help you have a successful workshop because I mean the facilitation part is hard enough and it gets even more difficult when you actually have to stop taking some people's issue with the tech one thing that I would also recommend if it's possible to have an extra person that is not facilitating but that can help in the background and this is it's funny because that role exists in in-person workshops as well and it's usually the person who is taking photos or running off to bring water or snacks but even in a remote or virtual setting that can really help even if there are like these little annoying things happening with the person maybe moving a canvas and a tool or something and as a facilitator you just don't want to deal with that stuff and it's really nice having a person cleaning after the group as we go along so preparation is really key in any case even in a virtual sprint Great, thanks Tim just before we move on let's delve more into some of the tools I just have a question for Robert and Anna Robert you mentioned before that I think you used an illustration of it would be in practical to have a one-to-one call with up to 30 people does a remote sprint allow you in your opinion to have that larger group on a sprint or are you still limited by a smaller number as you would be an in-person So the largest I've done to date has been 20 in one sprint virtually and usually what happens is if there are on the client side depending on time zones and depending on the complexity of what they're after sometimes there's two teams that are running concurrent sprints with each other and they use the same repository to trade information documents so in a way you're just setting up a rumble it's just a little more sophisticated anything beyond that you probably have to streamline things if you're talking about one's team without it getting too messy the upper limits on the virtual side seems to be about 12 to 13 people in one sprint and with that like Tim just said there's plenty of room for co-facilitators mentoring like some pre-work that can be done that can be defined within that kind of kind of arrangement so in my experience that's what I've seen Anna just a question for you because you have the benefit like us of running in-person and remote sprints do you feel like there is a facilitator persona that's better suited to virtual sprints versus in-person do you think that there's a certain personality type or approach that is better suited I guess that there are certain skills that a facilitator needs to have overall so the first thing make sure that you own the process and you understand the mechanics you have to be an excellent communicator you have to be very sharp when it comes to observing things you need to have a strong intuition but I guess that there are certain things that will just come with experience and the more sprints you facilitate the better you'll become at it now obviously there's a difference because when you're in the room with those people you can actually see the person and then you can see you can feel the energy you can see if they're on their phone if they're bored if they're paying attention or not but when it comes to remote sprints it's pretty hard to have visibility on what they do during the session so and here we actually check on and on with them to see if they're on the right path if they understood the challenge or the task that they have at hand if people focused and make sure you communicate very clear and one thing that we found to be really really useful is to have a visual support every time we have an online session we are heavily relying on our visual storytelling skills to make the best out of it even if you have a simple task at hand to make it visual so that you don't leave too much space for interpretation we found that now we're going to talk about tools because there's obviously a large spectrum of opportunity out there in terms of tools what we can use and what we can't obviously the success of a remote sprint relies incredibly heavily on the tools there is of use there availability there universality so I'm going to hear from you now while talk us through obviously from the perspective of mural we get the tools right and what can viewers of today's webinar use really as a checklist for selecting a tool and also what to do when they're in session with regard to tools yeah definitely it's a very big topic and we've heard tools coming up from the others already like in the preparation already it's super essential and with your tools we have like maybe like kind of like a checklist maybe like five different categories of very important tools the most essential tools there is many more like you know there is thousands of tools but there is like five different categories that we think are essential of which the first one is to communicate in real time you need a video conferencing tool whether that Zoom, Microsoft Teams Skype for Business this really depends on your preferences as a facilitator you need to be comfortable with it very important but also on the situation you're in with the client as Tim mentioned before like customers might have like a very different environment and then you're used to you also want to make your client comfortable with the tools they're used to already communicating in real time is like that's where the action happens right that is like a very important one but as you're doing things and working across different time zones so communicating asynchronously is essential you're not always in the real time mode having Zoom open while preparing so communicating asynchronously whether that's like through Slack text messages, WhatsApp any chat that you use email maybe even in one way you can stay in contact with each other is super important here and again make that as comfortable as possible for you and for your client then there is things that support that in like helping you organize a sprint online like a third one there I would say is tools to stay organized whether that's like a calendar or whether that's like a project tracking maybe something like Trello Basecamp these kind of tools that help you put a checklist together maybe you have like your sprint checklist in there that you share with the people that you're organizing it with or even with your clients they are like very helpful there and then of course you need to have a place where most of your content lives to share your content think about drives, Google drives box, Dropbox all these types of tools and finally you need a place to think visually and I say this like hey this is a place where we come in right it's not like you can do it on one tool you really rely on this spectrum of this ecosystem of tools to work together so mural there is like a visual work space the way we try to explain like the benefit of that I really like that way of explaining it is tools like zoom we use to see each other there is a couple of communication going on tools like mural a visual collaboration tool we use to understand each other so really when you visualize things things come to life and you really understand each other here and I mentioned it a couple of times I'm going to repeat it again you need to be as a facilitator you need to be comfortable with the tools you are using you are the one that is guiding the people through the exercise if you're not on top of it that is leading them and can explain things things might go wrong I can see that I've been in Robert's sprints or sessions with Robert I'm always amazed about the things that he knows I learn the latest tips and tricks on almost every tool from him he's really on top of things that brings a certain peace to your sessions but of course I want to highlight there is to become Robert overnight it's impossible to become Robert but maybe to become at the level of Robert there's a lot of steps that you take and it's really step by step that you will get more comfortable by it but yeah do your homework but then try it out and learn these kind of things one other highlight that I wanted to do Robert already mentioned turning on your webcam seeing each other this verbal communication is super important but again in different contexts different companies, different cultures people might not be used to doing it right so one tip that I can give there one thing that I try out is to just say in the beginning of the sprint or the beginning of the session at least for the beginning turn on our webcams to see if they keep it turned on and that often works for me those simple things but also think about I've heard excuses of not turning on your webcam because I heard one yesterday I had a bad hair day I don't want to put it on but also you have a messy background tip here use virtual backgrounds like you have in Zoom I'm in San Francisco now Microsoft Teams has the blur feature that is great make use of these things technology can go a long way that's fantastic wow thank you I assume that if we become rubber overnight do we get the grey hair as well yeah I'm just going to ask Tim to comment on some of the tools that we use partly because AJ and Smala are renowned for having codified our process and iterated it and evolved it over many years now almost to the minute in terms of the approaches we take to sprints and other workshops Tim, your view on tools and what's going to work what tips have you got for our viewers today yeah that's right we really like standardising things because it's way easier to just have new people get trained in these approaches and also slowly introducing them and giving them responsibility with remote sprints and virtual sprints it's a bit trickier because the tools are playing such a big part of it that sometimes this codified standardized approach just doesn't work because we cannot force our clients to use the tools that we prefer because for one it would be a really bad experience for everyone we are there to help them we're not there to just pull off a show or something for our own ego's sake so we have to conform to their needs and their environment as well so we have tried different tools and in the end it really depends on first of all the type of clients you're working with in that case none of the visual collaboration tools were feasible for them so we actually had to rely on Google Slides as kind of like our hack to actually make the workshop happen remotely and actually in that case it worked fine we had to conform our own process and approach these things to their situation and people always have to do that as someone who wants to guide people and be a service for them so it would be really great though if there was like the one tool that could do it all I mean in practice though and this is why the preparation is such a key part of our process so it's like the sprint is the tip of the iceberg happens kind of like below the surface and ideally the client will never know that all that stuff happened sessions where we are running through the tech setup again and again and then check if that's working now things like figuring out how we plan around different time zones how we plan around website and service and tool restrictions in certain countries so all of these things are becoming really important when it comes to a setup and I think that we found out and this is coming back to what Lo just said about like being able to see each other for us this interpersonal experience is such a critical part of the process and how much trust people give you as a facilitator that we are really trying to set things up in a way that the facilitator will have two displays one with the tool and we are asking our clients to do the same if it's possible for them just because it will be a better experience for them as well if they are actually able to see each other's faces there are also parts of the process when we by design tell people to you know like we're done with the tools for now we're just giving you homework and basically you can finish it on your own time and people will reconvene in the tool, in the visual workspace and kind of like come together again to proceed with the process because one thing that I really like about the design sprint is that at least in the in-person sprint it forces people to stop relying on technology when they're coming up with ideas and technology like as soon as people have a laptop in front of them there will be people who are able to make the perfect concept and we really want to avoid that temptation of people to become too precious about the ideas that they're creating so we have built in breaks in the process at least if it's feasible with different time zones where we are guiding people through the sketching process up to a point and when the point is so when the time has come to actually create a concept we will log off now we will check in with you individually and in three to six hours just send it to the facilitator we will upload it to the workspace and then we will come back so this is a really nice way to first of all they don't have to worry about uploading stuff themselves basically somebody from the team is taking care of that and it also allows people to still use their hands and stop relying on tools and this perfect approach to designing something or designing a concept so I think there's also something to think about just because you're in front of a computer it doesn't force you to rely on apps and programs for the entire process you can still have a bit of a mix of how you approach these different exercises that's great Tim you've started to introduce the next topic which is facilitation and I'm going to point to Anna and Robert now as well what tips or tricks have you got for facilitation and I'm particularly interested in perhaps how you build that early rapport in the room you can do through body language and in the coffee breaks you can build that rapport beyond can I have your perspective for our viewers please on your facilitation tips yeah I guess this is an excellent question I guess that some of that report is built before the sprint starts because we want to make sure that we had at least one conversation with the people joining the remote design sprint I guess that the big challenge that we have here is to break them down into chunks because we cannot replicate exactly the sprint as it is in person you cannot have people on call for eight hours straight that's just not possible it's going to be really tiring for them so for us the secret is to break it down into smaller chunks of maximum two-hour sessions so the first thing I'm going to be probably covering the same topics that were talked about before I'm going to be talking about how to break down into chunks because we have a proper call environment we actually say this out loud and this is a mandatory thing for us to have we do not accept calls from coffee shops with the machine riding in your background or with music that's just not the way to go we always ask people this is absolutely mandatory then video sharing again we mentioned that it's mandatory not necessarily because we are afraid that they are going to switch tabs obviously they can do that but we want to make sure that they are not lost because so many times we were doing a sprint and we saw people getting closer to the screen like completely lost and you can actually identify that and then see if that person is struggling with something and you can write down on Slack when we facilitate sprints just making sure that everything runs smoothly so I guess this gives us a bit of an advantage managing expectations from the get go this is absolutely mandatory again you have to explain very clearly which are the challenges what are the expected outcomes and we do not rely to people to remember every single thing that we tell them so we have a visual support again and again we actually have a mural template that we put together after so many iterations so we have visual work spaces just to make sure that things do not get complicated or messy people might move things around we try to lock them and make sure that we can take care of that as much as possible staying organized and giving updates is crucial and so we have synchronous and asynchronous sessions with our team members and after each call we try to make sure that we get feedback from them so we do not wait to receive feedback we want to make sure that they are comfortable to start the next session sometimes we also give them homework so for example for the concept part of concept sketching exercise we have to give them homework so we have a break we always have to check in with them because we want to make sure that they actually understood even though we placed examples and we give them clear instructions we just want to make sure that they understood what the concepts look like and then we try to minimize the interaction with the tool as much as possible for them so for example we collect that homework we upload it so they don't have to do basically the only thing that they have to do is to do the homework and then be online for the next session staying organized and giving updates again this is very very important and try to see if someone is lost and if you see that the energy is low try to bring it up to the sizes that you can do when you just start the sprint and just make them feel more comfortable and make them feel that this is something interesting and fun to do not just another meeting that they have in their calendar one more thing to add here we noticed that when we facilitate sprints remotely people tend to feel that this is not like a full work day and this is just another meeting in their calendar so we want to make sure that they actually allocate the time that they need even if we have only one hour and a half calls and they do not work on something else during that time that's super important Robert can we hear from you around with your seasoned seasoned approach that any tips and tricks around the facilitation in the moment in the room in the sprint tips tips and inside running for our viewers on facilitation I'm going to need to kind of bring it here so okay it begins with facilitation Monday seems to be the most pivotal day out of the entire engagement so after going through I don't know how many virtual in-person remote sprints the one thing I've learned more than anything else is not only are you there to run the process that is established by everyone to kind of go through a virtual sprint you're also there to help with conflict resolution and something that Seth Godin calls norming the room essentially leveling out any smoothing out any like conflicts that may be going on or any issues or may any lack of understanding around why people are there in the first place I have to credit Lisa Lambert for this first one where I tend to use a heavy dose of ice breakers in the very beginning of my sessions this kind of gives me a clue as to who's engaged and who isn't like warming up before they actually get into what they're going to be doing for the day also I tend to let conversations go there's a tendency to basically stick to a very rigid timeline when it comes to sprints to get certain things done like to go through different gates of exercises whether it's the four step sketch or the sticky decision or other things that traditionally we've all done as facilitators but what I've learned is that it's not only the process but why they're there and what we're doing as an activity not to a certain extent you don't want to let it go too far but if you're able to give a little bit of breathing room for everyone to have them verify their that why they're there their understanding maybe give an elevator pitch in the very beginning around why everyone is there the purpose of why you're doing things this greatly helps online and offline through different activities that you're asking the group to do I think it's really important to make sure that we remember that we're all humans first regardless of the technology we do use that everyone needs to be heard and understood and if you bring that if you bring that as like a higher level need to a facilitation effort whether it's in person or remote your chances of success I can't agree with you more really and I think managing the psychology of a team in the early stages of the sprint are in the facilitation component probably as important as the preparation is for the overall sprint success we have a range of techniques that allow people to through the we sort of almost call it like a purging or a release of whatever their ideas that they're bringing to the table or whatever they're dealing with in the context of the sprint is incredibly important to address that up front and I don't think that's specific to a sprint per se that's universal across any group work and group activities just managing the psychology of a team and getting people focused on the problem and clarity and alignment around the problem at hand before we head into our final topic did you want to add anything that you think we've missed critically in terms of a facilitation tip or trick nothing critical I could give a small tip but maybe in the interest of time we can when would you choose a remote sprint over an in-person and I think obviously for the Asia and Asia Pacific community there is no choice right now and this webinar and the resources we're going to make available in the buyers of the notes is a gift to that community to help them deal with something they have to do but there's also an environmental imperative and I think we can we can start to look at using remote sprints more often in lieu of in-person sprints wow do you want to give us your view and maybe Robert particularly on when would you use a remote sprint over an in-person is there some criteria that you would like to use in the witness test viewers can use to help make that decision and well I'll start with you yeah I think it's yeah very dependent on every situation and sometimes indeed people are forced by things that happen like the coronavirus but what we see happening with many of our customers is people are forced by sustainability sustainability reasons whether that's like people don't want to don't want to fly anymore it's looked at something as as bad you need to look for other options other ways are other sustainability reasons like a company trying to be carbon neutral can have a big impact and all the workshops that are going on like hey we cannot just fly around anymore because of environmental reasons or travel bans because of cost reasons Q4 in many enterprises is a no fly time there is like necessities at those points to do remote remote sprints and I think those are the clear ones where you really just have no other option that's it I think in general you would like to do things in person at least that's the way I look at it I would love to be able to work with my team face to face every day we would have a lot of fun understanding each other immediately but like that's just not possible so I think reality whatever that reality is in your case it kind of decides that almost like what it needs to be remote or in person I'm doing a lot of work remotely at the moment myself because I'm not wanting to infect the team with this terrible cold but Robert finally from you any advice to viewers around why they should choose a remote or when to choose a remote spread perhaps not so much from the environmental perspective but maybe from a challenge perspective you know are there reasons when a remote is just better even when you do have the choice of travelling and being in person yeah I was going to say Ayako Watts comments almost exactly the situation that you may be forced to in the environment I find that the clients I work with the things that keep on coming up are speed the costs involved with doing an in person which there are hidden costs probably more so than virtual and remote and flexibility are the key ones so I'll go over those briefly speed is that for the majority of the clients that I work with they don't care about the how or how it's done they want to know how fast they want them to fulfill whether that's pushing 15 different design projects out the door by the first quarter of this year or planning for 16 more for the second quarter they want to speed up their internal processes knowing that it's a slow cultural thing they definitely are interested in utilizing their distributed teams so that their processes can be more versatile and more flexible the costs it's like what was saying before a company isn't forced to fly everyone in from different parts of the world into one location to do an in person remote spread you don't have to pay for the hotel you don't have to pay for their the costs that they have to accrue while they're there the expenses have the administrative costs of having to process all of that the follow up where you have to do that if you really track it from soup to nuts there is a substantial business outcome argument around going more into the remote virtual space problem is that most companies aren't built for it and humans don't really like to change that much when it comes to things that are established especially in enterprise environments cultural norms, learning curves technical issues or even like the type of text sometimes has to go through a lot of gates to basically make that happen but those are the three costs, speed and flexibility outside of environmental situations are the things that I'm hearing more and more these days thanks very much Robert so I think even if even if people have the choice of an in person or a remote spread perhaps the advice for viewers today is to really choose your customers make sure they're ready for a remote solution so that you can make the best success of the outcomes I'm going to wrap up there today guys thanks so much for contributing your time to the viewers who I know will be very grateful for your expertise and your input check out the show notes because there will be resources there intensive insider guides templates and I know well Anna have very generously provided intensive tools and resources there thank you very much all the experts on today's panel will watch the commentary when we release the video on YouTube so be sure to put any specific questions you have or if you're looking for some science posts to particular information today's experts will keep monitoring the comment section so you just stick your questions right in there what you need and answer your quick questions when you need them so thanks everybody from AJ and SMART's perspective really appreciate your time and your energy and your dedication at doing something brilliantly being in the virtual space of something we love which is Design Sprints you all have a great day and we'll speak soon so thanks for watching we appreciate it's a long video but hopefully it was a valuable one for you if you want more practical valuable information just like this then subscribe on YouTube or follow us on LinkedIn where every day we're releasing fantastic content just for you thanks so much for watching and see 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