The rapid spread of the COVID-19 Coronavirus caught many people off-guard. In response to the growing concern of community-borne transmission public health officials have urged everyone take precautions like washing hands with soap and social distancing. Washing your hands is a simple and effective step that everyone can do. Creating and maintaining social distance is more difficult and comes with the cost of increased effort when managing documents and records while working remotely. Here are five tips that can help you and your team manage information reliably so that you can all communicate and keep on top of decisions, to-do lists, and deliverables:
Tip #1: Set Expectations and Communicate Clearly If you and your team are used to an ‘everybody-does-what-works-for-them’ approach to managing your information, then transitioning to a remote work pattern might seem like an abrupt shift. That’s ok – many of my clients have a work culture that is fairly relaxed about where to store electronic documents, how to manage versions, marking documents as final, and so on. This is the time to make changes, and that may include changes to how you work together. When transitioning to remote working practices, consider setting some clear expectations that can be followed without too much difficulty. It’s not hard. For example, decide on one place to store your documents and make sure everyone is putting the relevant stuff there. This should be a location that is easily accessible to everyone – it might be a cloud provider like GoogleDocs or Office365, it might be a shared drive environment (providing everyone has access through, e.g., a VPN), or it might be an online tool like Jira/Confluence, or another collaboration working space. It’s entirely acceptable for people to keep a local backup copy (subject to security or confidentiality, of course), or make a version that they can work on alone. But stress that, at the end of the day, everyone saves their work in one, managed location. Tip #2: Everyone Together Keeping everyone together on the same platform can be a challenge, especially if you have different teams using different tools for different reasons. If you use Slack for messaging, Confluence for whiteboarding and building a wiki, Office365 for storing your documents, and FreshBooks for your cloud accounting, you might have up to a dozen different ways to send, save, and retrieve information. More advanced organizations will have the resources to integrate services and give users one, seamless way to use all tools. But more often users will be switching across platforms and tools for different activities. Set some ground rules for which tools get used for which activities. Communicate this to everyone and stick to it. Simpler is obviously better, but there are sometimes when you really need a unique tool for a specific task. The goal is to ensure you have access to the information you need, when you need it. That means it is discoverable and saved in a managed space. Tip #3: Document, Document, Document Every meeting should have at least one designated note-taker. There are a ton of collaboration tools and services so this doesn’t have to be just one person’s responsibility -- try to make sure a few people are contributing to the note-taking and collate the notes after your meeting to make sure you have captured all the relevant content. Make sure that every action or decision has some documentation supporting it. This works well for Agile too (see Knowledge Management in Agile Projects). Take notes in collaboration tools like GoogleDocs, OneNote, or an online wiki. It should be easy for everyone to add their comments or notes. If you have having trouble with internet connectivity, then just take it offline and upload later. Document tasks and deliverables in a common space that everyone can access, review, and contribute to. This makes it easier to keep everyone on track and reduces the chance that people miss communications or get crossed signals. It’s also a good record of instruction given to different staff members, and dates deliverables are due. In many cases these can be integrated with scheduling tools like Planview, Microsoft 365, or Monday.com. Tip #4: Use Cloud Services Working remotely means internet connectivity may be inconsistent. Many people work in urban centres, but not everyone lives in a place with consistent access to the internet. This makes it difficult to collaborate in real-time or upload large files. Low bandwidth makes video-conferencing a challenge too, so be prepared for some audio-only meetings. If access is an issue, plan for this and use version control, dates, and scheduled upload times. Consider how much documentation you are asking staff with limited access to produce or manage. If it is very difficult to upload or connection speeds are slow, it might be a good idea to ask someone who has a higher bandwidth connection to take on more documentation and saving. Cloud services are also very useful because they are backed up and accessible. If you have a hardware failure, syncing to a cloud service protects your information and you can access it from another device. Tip#5: Keep a (Temporary) Backup Copy Cloud services are generally very reliable, but you should consider keeping a local backup every once in a while, for example, keep a copy of your end-of-day version. With some tools like Microsoft Office 365 you can easily sync local and cloud files to your desktop or laptop. In any case it’s a good idea to mark local files as a backup copy so you know it’s transitory. Once you know you don’t need it, delete it promptly. For example, once you connect and start working on the same document the following day, delete or overwrite your backup copy. Following some simple and consistent steps can improve your remote working experience and help you to manage your information until everyone is back in the office together. Information Management is complex but also possible. You can take control of the chaos with simple, repeatable steps. Are you looking for more help making sense of working remotely with your team? Contact info@cannonspark.ca for more details. Comments are closed.
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