Plant trees for the Jungle.

Resetting the requirement handling processes & educating team to build new collaboration model

Role & Duration

Tasks covered process & board building & internal adaptation.

Worked with IT team HK management.

Dec 2019 - Feb 2020 (3 months to set up)

Overview

The goal of this project is to facilitate the IT team in handling user feedbacks/requests from different departments & projects in a structured way. We hope to keep a backlog for product dev-related tasks in one place and promote autonomy to the working team for collaborating efficiently.

The tracking function of project management should improve the team's ability to deliver new features & bug fixes.

Project Board Set up

The Problem

Users from all levels submit feedbacks & requests everywhere, i.e. email, verbal, IM tools, no logging tool. Tasks can be easily missed, team reputation harmed.

When I join the team, there is no digital project management tool to help the team handle dev requests. Requests are all sent to the email of the senior person for centralisation and were assigned to each person one by one. The team relies on users to keep track of their requests themselves and react to them when the users "screams".

The team needs to handle a lot of firefighting every day and also arrange the time for new feature development & new projects. With the size of around 5 - 6 people and a fully packed schedule, no one has the time to proactively solve problems ahead, hence there is no motivation to set up a backlog. They might feel like being a part of a feature factory and working headlessly every day.

But - this is bad for a team influencing product dev delivery, as the individuals do not have any ownership towards the product they are helping to contribute. Management might need to spend 2x of effort to 'force' productivity.

How to stop this situation?

The Solution

DISCOVERY & DESIGN

This is not a new problem in the world of product development. From observing how other product team works in a startup environment or sharing from a larger scale organisation, using a tool to track tasks and allow collaboration is very essential and basic.

With a proper PM tool, people can always delegate tasks easily. The responsibility to pick up or assign tasks can be decentralised such that one party will not be the bottleneck of an operation, i.e. if the team lead is sick, the team will still have visibility on the department to-do list and operate themselves.

But the essence of decentralising comes from the willingness to adapt transparency, i.e. transparency of communications, transparency to share project & product information across teams. The team need to trust that the list will not 'turn against them' at the end of the day as 'proof of their mistakes' (e.g. bugs, delay response for lower priority issues).

The tool selection is an easier part - there are already a lot of SAAS solutions in the market that can provide this function, e.g. JIRA, Trello, Asana, Monday. However, I am not the boss of the company, so if I need to promote a new tool for the team, which might result in a short term higher demand of resources to adapt and 'do more things', the tool needs to be easy to use & flexible enough.

'Monday' is being chosen because of its low cost, flexibility, portability & usability:

It is just costing us USD5 per user monthly (just the price of one cup of coffee per person)
It is free to add other internal stakeholders to view the list to better manage their expectations
I can set up project boards according to the dev team old habit with small tweaks gradually to encourage the adaptation
It is very similar to an excel with collaboration ability, a lower learning curve for users
I can automatically generate views in Kanban / Gantt chart style to meet my communication needs.
It has some detailed design/surprise elements which make the workplace less boring (e.g. when I click "done" for an item during Xmas, it will pop up a snowman or tree as animation on the label)

BUILDING & TESTING

A few project board is built initially for different teams to include the tasks of a product from different projects, Ad hoc requests & bug report. With the support of IT management, the tool is being introduced in the team meeting, developers, QA, and vendors are encouraged to interact on the boards e.g.

All briefs for different products need to be logged on the 'Monday' board
PM will need to help manage the ticket assignment and also clear completed tasks timely
Cross-region developers are encouraged to reply & discuss with each other on the relevant thread
Although Emails discussion will be still in use, user stories & key decisions made will need to be recorded on the board for more effective communications

The Outcomes & Takeaways

GRADUALLY REDUCE CHAOS & BUILD A LONG-LASTING INFRASTRUCTURE

It was difficult to invite team members using new tools given that the dev team is not used to communicate in this way & a long list of items on their to-do list. However, with consistent encouragement, the team finally start using the boards themselves.

Some benefits we experienced after the tool was set up:

1. PMO can generate report of products/projects status easily: from 0.5 days to 30 mins

2. Dev can understand more on the user stories for developing a feature & give inputs

3. If tasks are halt for any reason and resume later, the team can easily catch up on the latest status.

3. Collaboration with external vendors & delivery status can be tracked in one place

Thanks for reading my sharing of this case, if you have any comment / story to share as well,

feel free to contact me and have a chat @ larissawu@gmail.com 😊

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