 All right. Let's go ahead and get started. So welcome, everyone. This is lessons from the trenches of a veteran PM who went remote. My name is Kristen. I have an intro slide a little bit later on, but thanks for coming. Welcome. Quick agenda of what we're going to go over. Like I said, a little bit of an intro and hopefully a little bit of getting to know you all through the chat. We're going to talk through some realities of remote project management and then work through some ways that you can set up your own personal processes to combat these realities that we're facing. And once you have your own personal processes set up, looking towards adapting your processes and changing your organization. And then finally some resources and tools just to click out to you once you get the slides might be helpful. So like I said, quick introduction, I know we're all working remotely right now during this pandemic and we've had to drastically change how we work in the past several months. It's been stressful and I know it's incredibly hard during this time, but there are some silver linings to our current situation and I'd like to focus on those. So three years ago I made the decision to work remotely because I was drowning in a daily commute. And it really changed my life to get nearly two hours a day back, getting some flexibility to being able to walk my dog Max or take a yoga class. You know, maybe do some housework so I can focus the weekends on relaxation and and doing things that are life related and not necessarily just cleaning my house or something like that. I had to move all my work experience from in person to online and that's exactly what we've all had to do in the past couple of months. So hopefully you've been able to benefit from some of these positives while you've been working at home. And I hope that I'm able to offer some tips and tricks to inspire you to streamline your processes or validate your approach to remote project management. So like I said, what about you all I'd like to get a little bit of interaction in the chat if we can. If you do or post in the chat if you've been just working remotely due to the pandemic or if you've been working remotely for longer than that. Pause here for a little bit just to see if people want to provide some feedback there. No worries if you don't in person I'd like have you raise your hand and you know, it'd be a little bit more interactive. It's kind of a mix but mostly mostly newer people to working remotely just great. Wonderful. So let's dig in. What are some of these realities of remote project management. So you no longer have the ability to walk up and give one of your coworkers or colleagues a shoulder tap. How are you going to get someone to read a status update when you can't just walk up to the desk and ask them for an update or ask the question in person. Another reality there's no office lunches or water cooler talk so how are you supposed to really get to know your coworkers. And we're all lacking a little bit of context as project managers we don't get the face time with our team members, and we can be really lacking that context on what their other project priorities are or what's going on outside of work. How are you to know when someone's available to respond and what their priorities are. Are there other realities that you're facing and transitioning to remote work, post any of your experiences in the chat. Yeah, Lily says time zones that's huge for sure. I don't think people do miss the shoulder tap but maybe, you know, occasionally, it's nice to be able to do that when you're a project manager and trying to get a response quickly. So let me combat some of these remote project management realities. I found that, you know, there are a couple of things that I've learned along the way to set up personally for the projects that I'm working on, and my teams that have worked really well so I wanted to focus on my processes first and see what worked for my projects and teams. And these are some of those examples. So whenever possible, I want to shift my own work to prioritize removing blockers for my team, whether or not you're practicing scrum. I always like to wear my scrum master hat to make sure that the team can move forward with work assigned to them. And for me, sometimes this means spending like the last hour of my day or so checking in with my clients on their feedback, or reviewing tasks in our task management system that are assigned to me for QA, making sure that every team member has something actionable to work on when they start their day. Speaking of time zones, I did shift this after starting working remotely to focus on removing blockers the first hour of my day, because I'm located on the east coast and a lot of my team is on the west coast. So time zones are a thing and when working with a widely distributed team. So keep that in mind when planning your own work. Removing blockers is an aspect of servant leadership that will earn you trust and respect from your team and help avoid your coworkers from sitting around with no tasks to work on. Speaking of that, it's also great to keep a queue of internal tasks that team members can grab when they may run out of billable work. Perhaps these are bugs bug fixes or updates to your own internal website, writing a blog post or doing some digging into a new technology. I don't know about you but I tend to overthink when or if to send a Slack message in question if I should follow up with someone on a deadline. I'm very cognizant of the signal to noise ratio that team members are receiving between Slack email and task management tools, not to mention all the pings of things outside of work. Similarly to removing blockers from my team at the end of my day, I also set up a time to follow up with my teams on things that are time sensitive. I'll schedule a message in Slack or put a reminder in my calendar. And this way if the team member happens to get back to me before the notification hits, I can delete the reminder and move on. But if not, I don't have the mental strain of having to remember to remind them and ask them at a time that's more convenient. When team members are allocated on multiple projects, this can be even more important. Let's say it's coming up on the end of the day Wednesday, and the expectation was set that the work should be completed by Friday, but I haven't seen any movement on the tasks. This might be a good time to check in to see if we're on track for delivery on Friday. Also, remember something's not time sensitive that it can wait. Wait until a check in time or another time I have communication with that team member. The type of works that our teams are doing can require deep thinking and focus. So there are so many studies out there about how long it can take to regain focus after a disruption. So as a project manager, I want to respect my team's need for getting into the flow and the efficiencies that can be gained by grouping my communications together when possible. I find that this method of follow up really strikes the right balance between providing friendly reminders and me ending up feeling like a nag. Remember that if you're working in an office, you wouldn't walk over and shoulder tap someone with over every little issue. So reserve your messages for when it's important so you don't become the project manager who calls more. So make sure you can monitor your projects yourself. What do you have in your control. A big part of my personal process is making sure I have systems and tools in place to allow for independent project monitoring. This would include setting key metrics in place, such as budgets and time tracking, task tracking and getting appropriate notifications. This way I can have the knowledge about a project and how it's performing without bothering my team. For instance, we set up a Slack channel for each project called bots, and that pulls in key notifications from JIRA, our task management tool. So while I'm in Slack having conversations or doing other work, I can see how issues are progressing on my projects and I don't have to actually go into the project itself in JIRA or switch over to an email. But if something strange comes up, I can dig in further if needed. We also use harvest for time tracking and we can set up reports there to get emailed when a percentage of the project budget is used, or when a team member submits time cards to the project that I'm managing. All of these can be helpful little signals that tell me that things are going well, or tell me that I need to stop everything and dig in for more information. All right, set up a video meet. This one's pretty self-explanatory and I think we've all heard this tip, but it's worth repeating. When messages or email threads are going back and forth more than three or four times, take it out to a quick call. Video call is best if tensions are running high for sure. This will allow you to talk in real time, put the puzzle pieces together, and figure out the best path forward. Remember to follow up in the initial thread for what was agreed upon in the call as the next steps to clarify for anyone that wasn't involved. What about video meetings in a different context here? This may not apply to many of us now, but when starting a new remote job, I recommend setting up individual video meetings with your coworkers to get to know about their roles and responsibilities. Ask them about their experiences, good or bad, with project managers, and infer a bit about their work style and how they like to be managed. I know we can all feel the bit of the Zoom fatigue of being on camera all the time, but it can be so beneficial. Over time, being on video calls, you can start to recognize personality traits that might be a signal for you to clarify a request, slow down, or maybe a particular person is zoning out a little bit or multitasking, and you can bring them back into the conversation more easily. Speaking of meetings, host meetings with a purpose, not a purpose. As a project manager, you're probably hosting a lot of meetings. Meetings get a really bad rap, but when working in a distributed team, they're critical to collaboration and communication. Even if you aren't practicing scrub in a strict sense, you can learn a lot about the various ceremonies included in the framework. Sprint planning. So this is when the team gets together and decides what they need to work on and complete it in a given timeframe. Daily scrum. This would be a short check-in meeting to discuss the status and align as a team. If your team is multi-allocated on many projects, you can adjust the frequency so you don't have to meet daily. Sprint review. This is a meeting to demonstrate the work that's been accomplished to the team and the stakeholders. And a sprint retrospective. This is when the team reviews the work and discuss what went well and what didn't go as planned so they can iterate and improve moving forward. So like I said, I go into every meeting with one of these purposes in mind. Maybe that purpose is explicit in the meeting invite and we're following scrum for this project, but maybe it's not. It helps me to frame the conversation and make sure that I have the right people on the call and I'm not wasting the team's time. So make sure the meeting has a specific purpose and if it does not, consider if it can be a Slack message and email or add it as an agenda item to another meeting. Celebrate your team and celebrate wins. In these times, there are some simple virtual ways to appreciate and celebrate your teams, like sending a message of gratitude and copying their manager via Slack or email. Start meetings by asking for good news and recent wins. And highlight a team member's contribution in an all-company meeting. But of course, a physical gesture means even more when working remotely. I need to step up my game here and do a better job of taking time for celebrations before moving on to the next project. So here are some things that I'm planning on initiating in the future. Thank you cards in the mail for a job well done or to team members that really stepped up to the plate. I also think sending birthday cards would be really fun. We don't get that pass around the card. Everyone sign it when we're working remotely. When you're getting to know your team, you can ask their favorite candy or treat and then you can send a little care package when the project is really ramping up. Shout out to Lily here. She recently sent out some candy to our team as a little inside joke. It was really sweet to get something in the mail and thoughtful of her and Ken for thinking of us. What are things that you've done to take celebrations out of the virtual world and into real life? Do you have any suggestions that you can post in the chat? We'll keep going. So hopefully you'll get your projects on track and you'll be able to start looking at the bigger picture of the organization of us as a whole. Here are some ideas that you can take back to your organizations and look like a hero. So creating a stand up Slack channel. This has been super helpful. This would be a dedicated channel where each team member posts what they're working on for the day. It's asynchronous so team member can post whenever they are starting their day time zones don't really matter. And personally for me, this is how I plan my priorities and activities for the day. It keeps me accountable to what I'm agreeing to accomplish. But as a project manager, I can also check it to see what other team members are working on for my projects and other projects that I'm not managing. So for example, I review it to make sure the urgent issue that Mike and I discussed is on his list. And I review it to make sure Crispin is connecting with the design team internally for edits. And I review it to see that grummy what grummy has on his plate. And if he can take on this week security updates. It's another tool that I use to know that I should if I should send a payout or follow up on a task or issue. Our team also does a really great job of posting if they have bandwidth. So when I see this I can load them up with more tasks or point them to our queue of internal work that can be pulled into their cycles. So align on communication norms with your team. Typically norms aren't something you explicitly write down. For example, social norms are defined as unwritten rules about how to behave that provide us with an expected idea of how to behave in a particular social group or culture. However, as a distributed workplace, we wanted to set the expectation and clearly outline communication norms at Calamuna. Our project management team put together a draft of proposed communication norms, and then we workshop them with the whole team to iterate align and adapt to reach norms that work for our whole organization. Some of our high level general norms are to communicate your availability to connect as humans and to always assume positive intent. We also outline norms for each of our tools, email slack meetings, JIRA, Google Drive, password management, etc. Here on the slide are our JIRA norms. As you can see they aren't rules about how to write a user story or what the acceptance criteria is going to be for this particular task. But they're general ideas around how we work in JIRA that apply across all projects. Funny enough, our most controversial norms were around Slack, probably because people's preferences and work styles can differ so greatly in this platform. But an important one that we've outlined is to respond to a Slack ping within two hours during your working hours with an answer or an update of when you'll be able to provide an answer. This one we're still working on but we review the norms with each team member as part of onboarding and then we workshop them every six months to adapt them to make sure they reflect how we work and how we want to work. Each department also created norms for their specific use cases and tools that they use that they maintain and own themselves. So it's really been like a whole company thing that shifted in our organization. Something else that I would advocate for your organization is to manage tasks in a central place. So whenever possible we manage our work in JIRA. For better or worse, this is our chosen system for task management. We occasionally have requests to use other systems due to a client need. For example, our partners at the American Foundation for the Blind had some accessibility concerns with JIRA when we first started working with them. I believe JIRA has thankfully improved these accessibility steps in the past year or two, but we really want success, but we really wanted to make sure everyone had access. So we successfully used a tool called Unito to sync Trello and JIRA to allow everyone to participate in the project. We prefer working in one task management tool for multiple reasons. One context switching is a thing. Remember what project uses what system and finding that link, getting used to the different UI to find the information you need. All of this takes time and brain space. So when we're working on several projects at once, it's important for us to maintain consistency for our team. The second reason is visibility. If all my work is in one system, I can see it all and set relative priority across projects and teams. One way we do this is by setting up a JIRA dashboard to display all the team members' issues. And as a project manager, I can have the visibility into what my teams are doing on my projects as well as projects that I might not be managing. So this is a screenshot of our JIRA dashboard. The tasks that are assigned to me, it's not quite as interesting as maybe a developer's might be. We could go on and on talking about different tools and their pros and cons, but really the key here is to find a tool that works best for your team, stick with it and use it for all projects. What task management tool are you all using? Feel free to post in the chat. So make sure you take time to connect as a project leadership team. As previously mentioned, when working remotely, visibility into what your teams are working on is so important. Because of this, we make it a point to meet as a team over Google Meet as project leadership team once a week. Including all project managers, account managers, department leaders, and sales reps to review the status of every single active project and those projects that are likely to close in the sales process. Our team does this by reviewing forecast, a tool that allows us to resource a team member across projects. So here we can see the bandwidth and availability in the near and far term. We align on priorities for the upcoming week and plan out that queue of internal tasks. We also make sure to account for any PTO or holidays coming up so that our team can rest and step away from work. It's also our chance to flag any project risks or new project opportunities with leadership team and discuss who will take on the next steps. It's a long but impactful meeting for us to align and connect. So the purpose is sprint planning. Also take time to connect as a company. When it's safe and easier to do so, I really advocate for an in person get together with your whole company. When I started working with Kalamina, I was able to attend bad kept my very first week on the job. We were able to build bonds over lunches and dinners, escape rooms, conference attendance and share downtime watching cat videos and cooking eggs. These experiences are invaluable for growing together as a high performing team and building connections that last long after you fly home. But while you can't be in person, do other activities virtually holiday parties this particular pictures from our holiday party last year that Lily hosted happy hours are great game nights etc. It's surprising how much fun they can be and how much you can learn about your coworkers in this in this arena. First, there isn't a one size fits all solution for every organization. Some of us choose to work remotely so we might tend to be a bit more introverted. So find what works best for you and your organization. Maybe that's one on one coffee dates or taking time at the beginning meetings to talk about stuff outside of work. There are some lower barrier of entry ideas that help. These are some of the tools and resources. These are some of the tools that I mentioned here and there's links out to harvest and forecast Jira Unito which is that tool that kind of syncs various tasks management systems, as well as the slack schedule or which I really use to schedule those slack messages to go out at a time that makes sense for both the team member in their time zone and also kind of like group messages together so that they're not getting things throughout the day. I posted this link in chat, but there are some other helpful articles on the Kalamuna blog about tips from working from home or whole team kind of compiled some of their favorite tips for setting up a great home office and, you know, working remotely. Of course, the epic holiday party is in there. There's also an article on building a better Jira dashboard and how to use Unito to sync some of those tools. Alright, I got through that kind of quickly, but does anyone have any questions or want to dig into anything. One thing I did want to note that Lily posted is to make sure you connect with the person that you're going to be sending something to for their address to maintain privacy. Anyone want to come into the session and ask a question or ask a question in chat. So everyone jump it once. Lily in the chat asks, what's been the biggest challenge transitioning remote as a project manager. I think for me personally it's kind of like balancing my own schedule and figuring out you know what my daily work is going to look like. Sometimes I have like my mornings free to do deep work and get things done, and then my evenings are for afternoons and evenings are in meetings managing the design process remotely. Yeah, what does that look like. It is interesting. Yeah, we definitely have full scope redesign projects at Kalamuna so we start with discovery and then move into design most frequently in our projects. We have a design lead on the project that really will own the collaboration between the design team. And also with the client so really focused on that person to make sure that everyone's collaborating and you know working together closely and collaborative tools such as Lucid chart and Google Docs things like that. Setting up working sessions is really important for design. We do collaborative sketching sessions where we'll, you know, get the our internal team as well as the client stakeholders on a call and go through sketching together and then we'll bring up the sketches on like a Google slide deck and kind of have the person present and walk through them. So, there are definitely tools and ways to go through it but sometimes it is nice to have a onsite where you can all get together and work more closely. We are expanding on some strategies for how not to be a nag. It's, it's hard it's one of those things that I really take to heart that I want to make sure that I'm not not doing that for my team. I think for me it's really consolidating my questions and and touch points with them. So making sure that, you know, I'm reaching out to them once and maybe asking about three different projects or, you know, leaving it to those check-ins that we have, if it's not something urgent, you know, waiting for the scheduled times for us to talk about that particular project. I really believe in treating people like adults. We're all adults and we're all coworkers. So making sure that, you know, people are following up on their requests and their end of the bargain is important too. We got my emails there in the chat and the recording should be up soon, so happy to talk project management with you all at any time. Enjoy the rest of your bad camp.