Me Think/We Think Accelerating Collaboration

What does it mean to collaborate when we are distributed over space and time?

In our second exploration of sprinting in the remote landscape, we look a little more deeply at how to elegantly integrate synchronous and asynchronous modes. We believe it isn’t enough to just adapt established activities and artifacts. So in this project, we offer up tools to help teams adapt their planning, their purpose and their facilitation in a way that gets the best collaborative experience for this new way of working.

The Challenge

Remote work and collaboration was already on the rise, but 2020 forced new working models that necessitated effective asynchronous collaboration. Traditional in-person collaboration with different roles has been well established, maintaining focus, engagement and output when cross-functional teams are distributed requires a new approach.

Stages for asynchronous collaboration

The Approach

How it works

  1. Identify changing roles and increasing needs of the sprint lead -- this requires more planning and effort of sprint leads.
  2. Plan strategies to help reduce friction/barriers of sprinting remotely and asynchronously. 
  3. Leverage asynchronous time for more reflection.
  4. See the opportunity for richer idea development, ensuring high quality output of working asynchronously.
  5. Create more touchpoints to share and build on the work done asynchronously.
Communication channels are essential to asynchronous collaboration