Our top 5 tips for remote working

Sometimes I think about how people want space colonies but zero people have ever successfully run a videoconference on the first try.

— Jane Ruffino (@janeruffino) June 4, 2018

Technology promises the idea that people can work from anywhere. Ever since the first conference call in 1947, each new communication tool promised greater freedom from the 9-5. From email and mobile phones, to cloud-based software and newer tools like Trello and Slack, it’s easier than ever to work outside of an office. According to a 2015 You Gov poll, 54% of workers are able to work remotely.

A new wave of tech companies are shunning expensive offices in Silicon Valley or East London. Instead, they hope to attract talented people by not restricting their hiring pool to one city and embracing remote teams.

The typical stock photo does not match the reality of most remote workers.

Yet for every article about digital nomads or companies ditching their office, the reality for many workers is they have the option to work from home, but most of their colleagues are in a head office. Enjoying all the meetings, interactions and perks that come as part of an office environment.

Cancer Research UK is a national charity and 65% of our staff aren’t based in the London office. The Technology team is collaborating with more teams across the charity to build digital skills and capabilities. However, some of our ways of working can have a bias towards being in the same room. Which can be a problem when some of your team are sat next to you and some are at home.

I recently worked with a team based across the UK, something you’d expect when running and marketing fundraising events across the country. It became clear that we needed to adapt how we worked in order to make progress. So, we agreed as a team to apply a test and learn approach to how we worked. We made it an outcome of the work, alongside building and iterating a user journey for the new events. By the end, we would have at least found out some better ways of collaborating and communicating as a team.

One of the great things about working in Technology at Cancer Research UK is the collaborative environment. It’s easy to stroll over and ask a colleague for advice and teams demo their work in the open. We cover the walls in post its and roadmaps. There are stand ups twice a week with an open agenda, which is a great way to learn from others.

Working with teams who aren’t based in our main London office made me realise that all these things aren’t accessible to remote workers. While flexible and remote working are common here, we’re still trying to find ways to take our culture beyond the walls of the office.

Installing Skype and giving staff permission to work from home won’t automatically turn you into a high performing remote team. If this was the case, perhaps we’d all have abandoned our offices in favour of a beach in Bali. Instead, it’s a case of trying out new things, and being ok with the fact that your first virtual workshop may fail. Because even if stuff goes wrong you’ll learn a lot!

We’re already experimenting with finding out how to make it easier to collaborate and be more productive. We've been sharing tips in a Slack channel for remote workers, so here are 5 tips to help become more a remote friendly team.

1. Become remote friendly

Think about what contributes to a high performing team and don’t restrict this to within the office walls. Are open product demos, roadmaps on walls, decision making processes, even social occasions, inclusive to remote team members? There are lots of tips out there, like templates to run a remote retrospective and advice for running a remote show and tell demo.

2. If one person is remote, everyone is remote

Rather than have one person dial in from home, we’ve found it works better to have everyone dial in, so we all have the same experience. Communication is a big part of remote working and this is a simple way to make it more inclusive for everyone.

3. Virtual collaboration does work

Working remotely doesn’t have to mean only doing solitary tasks. Whether you’re mapping your assumptions to try and solve a problem, having a team retrospective or even a full design sprint, just give it a go! Try out virtual whiteboard tools such as Mural, Real Time Board or DIY your own using Google Draw. We often say things are easier face to face but Ele Gibson, whose job it is to get fundraising staff to embody agile and lean principles, challenges that assumption, "our virtual retrospective using Mural was genuinely fun and we worked more efficiently than when we're face to face."

4. Find out what works for you

Could working in a coffee shop boost your productivity? Lilli Peters, Senior Executive in the Community Development team, ran her own experiment to find out if changing her environment could improve how she worked. "I’ve definitely found it a welcome change of scenery. I’m not sure I’ll come out to coffee shops too often, but I might pop Spotify on at home more frequently." The reality of being a digital nomad may be less glamourous behind the Instagram filters, but if you try out different set ups, you can find out what helps you work best.

5. Don’t forget the social side of work

If you aren’t seeing each other in the office, it could be easy to feel less connected to your team says Rob Green Senior Manager, Support Insight & Testing. He works with a distributed team who have experimented with creative ways to address this challenge. Katie Cartwright, Business Development Manager, created a ‘Hall of Fame’ Trello board showing who everyone is with some background into who they are, what's important to them and how they can help. This is particularly useful for new starters. Why not ask your team how they want to celebrate birthdays, if the usual cake in the office is off the table.


These are just a few of things we’ve learnt from applying our test and learn mindset to how we work and we're continuing to find ways to improve, such as live streaming internal demos and stand ups. Longer term, as we prepare to move to our new head office building in Stratford in 2019, we're looking into what the future of work looks like. If you have any remote working tips, let us know in the comments.

Next time someone declines a workshop request because they are working from home, why not have a think about how you can include them and give it a try?

Leanne Griffin
Digital Proposition Manager

Design Sprints at Cancer Research UK

Finding new, faster and more user-centric ways of working to help us beat cancer sooner is a core purpose of our team here at Cancer Research UK. For a while now, but more intensely so in the last few months, one of the tools we’ve been using to achieve that are Design Sprints.

So what are Design Sprints, and how can you use them in your organisation?

Design sprints come from Google, where design partner Jake Knapp started running them in 2010 with teams like Chrome, Google Search and Google X. Then in 2012 he brought them to Google Ventures – an important note, as Google Ventures doesn’t just deal with software companies, but with a variety of organisations. Here is Jake’s definition of a design sprint:

“The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers. It’s a “greatest-hits” of business strategy, innovation, behavioral science, design, and more - packed into a step-by-step process that any team can use.*”

Sounds brilliant, right? But in practical terms… what does it mean?

In a nutshell: during a Design Sprint, a group of people from your organisation come together for 5 days, in a room, to try and solve a problem or answer a question. By the end of those 5 days, they will have come up with a potential solution, sketched it, built it – and what’s best, they will have tested it with real users.

Any team can try out a Design Sprint, and no challenge is too big to answer. To get started, here’s what you’ll need…

A team

Design Sprint best practice says that your team should be made up of 7 people or fewer. You can stretch this a bit, but we did find that smaller teams were more effective.

One of these people will be your Decider – someone who can move things along by making an executive decision when the group can’t. This role should be played by your problem or idea’s stakeholder. This ensures that whatever solution you end up building, they’re confidently bought into it.

Another person will be your Facilitator. This role requires a lot of energy, to keep the team motivated and on track throughout the week. If you have someone in your team who has some experience of Agile ways of working, this role might suit them well since they’ll be familiar with some of the activities that will happen in the Sprint – but it’s not essential.

As for the other team members, who you need depends partly on the problem you are trying to solve. In our Sprints, we try to always have a UXer, a ‘technical’ expert (for example, someone who knows your CMS, if you’re working on a website-based idea), someone with content and message strengths, and someone who brings a marketing/commercial point of view. At Cancer Research UK, we mostly self-organise our Sprints: it’s a brilliant opportunity to let teams organise around the work!

Remember: the strength of the Design Sprint comes from having a varied group of people working together for a short but intensive period of time. The wider the range of points of view you can bring in, the better! You might not all agree at the start of the Sprint, but you will have reached a consensus by the end of it (you will – I promise!).

Time and space

A Design Sprint takes 5 consecutive days. This may feel like a big commitment, but if you consider how much you will get done in those 5 days (and how long it might otherwise take to get there), it’s hugely productive. And after all, if your team can’t dedicate 5 days to this idea, is it really an idea you believe in?

Once you get more familiar with the structure of Design Sprint, you might find you want to shorten the process to 4 or even 3 days – but if it’s your first try, we found it better to stick to the 5 days.

You’ll also need a room, with lots of whiteboards, post-its, and sharpies. Try to use the same room each day if you can.

A challenge

What type of question can you try to answer in a Design Sprint? According to Jake Knapp, the bigger the challenge, the better the Sprint.

For example, we’ve used Design Sprints to:

• find out the viability of a new product
• review the roadmap of an existing one
• kick-off a new marketing campaign
• bring a fresh perspective on a problem when we were stuck

Design Sprints can be used for all of these questions – and more!

How do you start?

If you want to get started with doing Design Sprints, my advice would be to simply start! Many of us here at Cancer Research UK didn’t have any experience of facilitating a Design Sprint: we read the Sprint book (see footnote below), talked about it as a team, and then we just went for it. It might seem a bit daunting to dedicate a week to something you’ve never tried before, but what you will learn from designing, prototyping and testing an idea with real users in a week is so valuable, that it will be worth the initial discomfort.

And if you do decide to give Design Sprints a try, or if you already use them in your charity – we’d love to hear how you use them!

Giulia Merlo
Lead Proposition Manager

*Jake Knapp with John Zeratski & Braden Kowitz, Sprint: How to solve big problems and test new ideas in just five days, Bantam Press, 2016.

Being a digital generalist in a world full of specialists

I'm Becky and I'm a Digital Producer at Cancer Research UK. You're probably thinking "What's a Digital Producer?". People often don't understand what we do. Our job title is pretty vague. But that's because we're digital 'generalists'.

Back in the early days of the web everyone was a generalist ("Webmaster"): but it became apparent fairly quickly that there's more to creating and running a website than just buying a URL, sticking up some content and clicking publish. There's now a huge variety of ways you can become a digital specialist, from developing to diving into analytics - but being a generalist, like a Producer, is still a skill in itself.

What is a Producer anyway?

Producers have a broad understanding of all the digital disciplines and, while our role is difficult to summarise, we basically help teams understand what a good digital experience is and how to deliver it for their users.

We're responsible for working with our colleagues across the organisation to produce user-centric content, campaigns and products that meet the highest digital standards, follow best practice and represent our brand.

On a day-to-day basis we can be found:

• creating or amending content on our content management systems
• setting up and measuring tests
• facilitating user testing/interviews
• analysing metrics
• writing user stories
• finding great imagery and optimising it for the web
• copywriting for the web
• training people on all of the above, both formally and informally, and
• supporting colleagues from across the organisation during Digital Hour, which I'll touch on later in this post

Team work makes the dream work

Of course we can't do all this by ourselves.

While we have knowledge of things like UX, wireframing, accessibility, content strategy, HTML, SEO, analytics and product development, we're part of a cross-discipline team which includes skilled specialists in these areas and part of our role involves knowing when to call in the experts, utilising their in-depth knowledge so we can make our digital offering the best for our users (and learn ourselves at the same time!).

Greg already shared how we communicate with each other, using software like Slack and Trello, and these free tools are vital in making sure we can work with our colleagues quickly and effectively. We also have regular stand ups and demos where we show what we've been up to and what we've discovered, so we're sharing knowledge, reducing duplication and all learning together.

Variety is the spice of life 

If you talk to anyone in my team, you'll quickly find the thing we like most about our job is that we get to be involved in everything. Really, everything.

We're constantly learning and having the chance to experience working across all the digital disciplines means we can find out what we'd like to specialise in in the long-term. Since I joined the team, just 10 months ago, I've seen 3 Producers move on to UX and Product Management roles. Getting involved is encouraged at Cancer Research UK - and it's really fun to have such a varied role!

We're also helping the organisation become more digitally empowered, which is saving money that can instead go towards our life-saving cancer research. For example, as part of a spoke to improve prospective volunteers' online experience, we built a registration of interest form so that specialists who want to share their experience in things like finance and photography can give us their details: we've seen 4 times as many registrations as we expected and these volunteers are potentially worth a staggering £3m a year.

Training and support

For colleagues who want to improve their digital skillset, the production team hold regular Introduction to Drupal training and, of course, offer ad-hoc help, guidance and support.

We also host Digital Hour twice a week, where people can drop in and see us with queries or refreshers on quick Drupal tasks, such as how to upload a web-optimised image and ensure it has an appropriate alt tag.

Besides the buzz we get from knowing we're benefiting the charity, one of the best things about being a Producer is getting to work with people across the organisation, helping them to realise all the ways in which being more digital can benefit them, the organisation and their users. It's incredibly rewarding and exciting.

Becky Colley
Digital Content Producer

Why should charities use Jira and Confluence to get things done?

I recently spoke at an Open Charity meetup event in London about how charities can save thousands, reduce waste and create awesome digital products using tools made by a company called Atlassian. Here are some of the main takeaways from that presentation. Powerpoint slidedeck can be downloaded here. 

What are JIRA and Confluence?

Jira

Jira is used to track tasks and issues for your project and helps you deliver more work, faster. It is popular with software teams but is by no means limited to them. A team using Jira can easily track many types of work, from simple tasks to bugs and user stories common to agile teams. We use multiple management styles at Cancer Research UK, and Jira is well-suited to many situations. The main benefit of Jira over good old white board and post-its is its reporting capability: all the work your team has ever done is kept in Jira so you can set up powerful dashboards and reports which empower managers to better forecast future delivery.

Confluence

Confluence is essentially a wiki for your organisation. it is a great tool for team collaboration and document management. Have you ever spent half an hour searching for that really important information buried somewhere in your email inbox? Confluence allows your teams to have 'one source of truth' for collaborative documents and meeting notes. Powerful macros allow you to dynamically display content to keep landing pages fresh. If integrated with Jira, you can dynamically link to lists of work items and dashboard widgets (See 'examples of good user stories' Jira widget below).

Why should I care?

If you are a registered charity and you have the capability to install and configure these programs in-house, they are completely free for you. This would include many add-ons which normally cost thousands.

These tools allow teams to be on the same page with high visibility and transparency of their work (see project dashboard below). They are highly configurable such that they can scale from a tiny startup to a massive enterprise-grade company. Dynamic reporting tools and dashboards eliminate what might otherwise be manual effort. 

What about other tools?

At Cancer Research UK, we use a combination of tools for Digital delivery.  We want delivery teams to be free to choose the tool that is right for them. There are competing products but lately we've found Slack, Trello, JIRA and Confluence to be the most useful. But it is a crowded field. Competing in this space are Sharepoint, Yammer, Skype, Hipchat, VersionOne, MS Office and Google Drive to name but a few. For a charity which needs to watch their budget, I recommend Trello, the Atlassian tools, Slack and Google Drive.  Pivotal Tracker is also worth a mention, as they have a significant free plan for non-profits.

Conclusion

Whether you’re a charity of 5 people or 500, the tools described here will help you deliver high quality work, quicker, across multiple projects varying in degree of complexity. See below for further reading and video tutorials. 

• JIRA Software information
• Confluence information
• Atlassian's Youtube channel

Open Charity Meetup

Open Charity is a public meetup based in London. For several years it was a rag tag group of charities and their partners meeting privately, but as of late 2016, their public events feature guest speakers, lightning talks and networking. Their focus is on bringing charities and partners together to collaborate and share open solutions to create value in the digital space. If you are interested in sponsoring, speaking or providing a venue, please get in touch via one of these channels. 

• Twitter: @opencharityorg
• Meetup: meetup.com/Open-Charity
• Web: opencharityuk.org
• Facebook: facebook.com/opencharityorg