I am team lead for a 100% remote consulting team. My observations mostly match what’s already been posted, but let me reiterate what I see from a level 1 manager perspective.
If using agile, create work items/PBIs for everything and document decisions in your tool (or, less optimally, in slack/teams/other persistent group chat tool). I obsessively look in these tools to understand what my team is doing/ has done.
Go through work items/PBIs as a team frequently (we nominally do daily, it’s more like every other day) to update remaining work. If I as the L1 manager see your work melting away I’m happy and you have great evidence of productivity.
Communicate what is happening in the rest of your life. If I know my team member has family visiting or a sick kid I can mentally process that better than a simple “my productivity will be down for a few days”. Even worse is not communicating at all- I have seen team members disappear for days and screw up our sprint commitments. I understand there are cultural issues here at times, but team members who don’t communicate are a problem: the customer and L2+ bosses want to know reasons why things slip and this information often gets communicated up the chain. Why work isn’t happening is also important.
Don’t miss commitments and communicate risks or issues that might cause a miss early and loudly. And do so in writing (preferably in the chat channel). I have had people burn down a PBI for a whole sprint only to discover it half done, now we have a trust issue and I’m not sure I can trust the information I do have about productivity.
Note- I don’t really track my teams PRs or code commits, I track completion of user stories/tasks. One of my team members talked the customer into using an off the shelf service to implement a feature last week. No code commit, but I know her productivity is very high because she knocked off her features like crazy.
Demo both code and features to team. This is great for knowledge transfer and keeps the whole team aware of what is going on.
Hope that helps.
Ed- I work in a very “enterprisey” world, YMMV in more consumer or packaged service oriented world
If using agile, create work items/PBIs for everything and document decisions in your tool (or, less optimally, in slack/teams/other persistent group chat tool). I obsessively look in these tools to understand what my team is doing/ has done.
Go through work items/PBIs as a team frequently (we nominally do daily, it’s more like every other day) to update remaining work. If I as the L1 manager see your work melting away I’m happy and you have great evidence of productivity.
Communicate what is happening in the rest of your life. If I know my team member has family visiting or a sick kid I can mentally process that better than a simple “my productivity will be down for a few days”. Even worse is not communicating at all- I have seen team members disappear for days and screw up our sprint commitments. I understand there are cultural issues here at times, but team members who don’t communicate are a problem: the customer and L2+ bosses want to know reasons why things slip and this information often gets communicated up the chain. Why work isn’t happening is also important.
Don’t miss commitments and communicate risks or issues that might cause a miss early and loudly. And do so in writing (preferably in the chat channel). I have had people burn down a PBI for a whole sprint only to discover it half done, now we have a trust issue and I’m not sure I can trust the information I do have about productivity.
Note- I don’t really track my teams PRs or code commits, I track completion of user stories/tasks. One of my team members talked the customer into using an off the shelf service to implement a feature last week. No code commit, but I know her productivity is very high because she knocked off her features like crazy.
Demo both code and features to team. This is great for knowledge transfer and keeps the whole team aware of what is going on.
Hope that helps.
Ed- I work in a very “enterprisey” world, YMMV in more consumer or packaged service oriented world