An Example of Online Collaboration Done Very Well
Just because you’re remote doesn’t mean you can’t Collaborate
During the early part of the Shelter in Place, I participated in a highly collaborative design sprint exercise. The whole session was online.
Since the Agile ideal is face to face, who says you can’t have the same fidelity, if not better, of collaborative brainstorming sessions online? See for yourself:
To say that I had fun doing this is an understatement. I got all my creative juices going, and I think I came up with a pretty good idea in the end.
There are three things that you can take away from this highly successful online collaboration. One is an excellent and effective facilitator. He adeptly handled and guided people throughout, giving instructions, helping when needed, and asking probing questions.
The second thing is that facilitator must be well prepared. Notice that all the tooling was in place at the very start. Our facilitator communicated prepared instructions in multiple ways – verbally, textually, as well as visually. Being able to do this requires intentioned planning.
Third is the right tool to use. I’ve seen people try to collaborate similarly with Google docs or spreadsheets, especially in this pandemic. The results were mediocre.
Thanks toRobert Skrobefor holding and facilitating this session. I enjoyed a great learning moment as a participant. You can catch more of what he does on theDallas Design Sprint YouTube channel.
