Because of the nature of my research, remote collaborations have become essential. Here are some notes on what I found useful on how to better manage these remote projects. There are many more, but I list only three points here, which seem to work in my team in my area of the research. Hope this may be useful to some people!
Table of contents
- Toyota Matrix & Trello Board
- Attach the estimated date to finish on every item on the ToDo list
- Try to make each goal concrete, following the MAC principle
1) Toyota Matrix & Trello Board
In our lab, we have been implementing a method, called the “Toyota matrix”. It consists 4 regions, each of which lists various items related to the project. “Todo”, “Next”, “Problems” and “Awesome”. There are lots of similar techniques, called in different names, like WOOP etc.
As a Toyota matrix, we have used a whiteboard and Google Doc, which works well. Recently, we migrated into Trello, which is better in some aspects. One advantage of Trello is that the owner of the board can move items in “ToDo” into “Done”, which the team can review later.
The most important among 4 regions for me is “Awesome“. Share the “Awesome” goal among the team is quite important. The video from Spotify is inspiring. https://vimeo.com/94950270
If the team doesn’t align with the Awesome goals, collaboration can collapses.
Next important is “Problems“. This can be a difficult component of the matrix to fill if the team consists of all optimists. When we have realists / pessimists, they can come up with all sorts of potential failures. This is very useful. According to the science of the planning, we improve the success rate of the project if we are aware of problems. As I myself is optimistic, these negative comments are useful to keep. If they turn out not big problems, that’s also fine. Explicit listing of these potential problems are also good for pessimists. If they keep on thinking and ruminating these concerns, that can be harmful for the progress. I have seen many cases where these concerns are irrelevant in the end.
In our team, we use “Todo” to list goals and projects that the owner of the board plans to complete soon. We usually meet once a week or two weeks. So, anything that we plan to do before the next meeting comes under Todo.
Anything that won’t finish before the next meeting will go into “Next” area.
So, that’s the first step.
2) Attach the estimated date to finish on every item on the ToDo list
Next thing, which I recently found super important, is to estimate a date of completion for each ToDo item.
It’s known that >40% of items on ToDo list is never finished, if it doesn’t have a date.
There are several problems with the ToDo items without dates.
a) We can’t agree on the priority of the items.
b) We can’t understand each other what is causing the delay of each step. (Or, sources of the under- and over- estimation of these delay).
Having estimated dates of completion makes these issues manageable.
I find it’s better to use a term “estimated dates”. If we call them “deadlines”, it puts unnecessary pressure to the team members.
With these estimates, it becomes clear that almost everyone has significant biases. The biases may be due to perfectionism, planning fallacy, etc.
It seems many struggles come from poor planning of goals. We can improve the quality of goals by making it more measurable and actionable.
3) Try to make each goal concrete, following the MAC principle
M – Measurable
A – Actionable
C – Competent
I’ll skip the C part, for now.
I found that abstract goals, such as “Understand LME”, are not suited to put in ToDo. (Although, these abstract goals can be very effective and important in Awesome).
The problem of the abstract goals is that the team cannot assess whether we achieved them or not. It is better to make each item “measurable”. Compared to “understand LME”, “Read Chapter on LME” is better. “Apply LME to analyse the data” is even better.
Actionability follows a similar principle. If the goals are not something that we can do with concrete actions, it’s hard to see if we are doing something.
Once you get here, breaking down the items further, so that the owner of the board can achieve 4-5 seems to work well. Having many achievable goals makes achieving these feels like a game!
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