One single source of truth

You know what I miss these days?

The team room.

One of those typical conference rooms. Bad chairs. Fluorescent light. Half-empty coffee cups everywhere. A dirty whiteboard. That colleague in the corner who talks too loud on the phone.

Don’t get me wrong - remote work has a lot of perks.

But there was just something about those rooms that made it feel real.

Why?

Because that’s where it was happening.

One place to create, communicate, and coordinate.

You’d never wonder what Susan was working on, because she’s 2 chairs away from you.

Sure, it was terrible to get deep work done, but the alignment was magic.

And I’m a strong believer that if an entire team rows in the same direction, anything becomes figureoutable.

So how do we create that in a remote, digital world?

I’ve spent years reading, experimenting, and gathering ideas about this. And while I won’t claim to have the secret recipe to cure all issues, there’s one thing all successful remote teams have in common:

they fight the siloing of information as if their survival depends on it.

Because it does.

They create one transparent source of truth.

One place to create, communicate, and coordinate.

Just like that good old team room.

Create

When I mean create, I’m talking about all deliverables. That can be code, documentation, designs, or anything in between. Everyone on the team has to know what goes where, and how.

Because if it’s all in the same place and done in the same way, you avoid version conflicts and cut search time - just like a physical team room.

Communicate

Slack vs Teams.
Email vs snail mail.
Google Meet vs Zoom.

I don’t care which one you pick, and neither should you. As long as you pick one. Have you ever found yourself trying to stay on top of 5 different channels?

If you have, you know it’s next to impossible. Don’t allow it to happen.

And speaking of communication: most tech workers don't work uninterrupted for more than 6 minutes.

Six. Freaking. Minutes. (source)

Think about that before you send that message. Does this have to be dealt with right away? Then maybe you should pick up the phone and do it synchronously.

If not, choose an unobtrusive channel, and don’t expect an answer within a few minutes. It’s either now or whenever is convenient for the receiver. As with many things, steer clear of the middle ground.

Sync or async, not half-sync.

Texting me to ask if I’ve seen your email from 3 hours ago?

No thanks.

You as the project leader set the norm. Not just in where you communicate, but also in how.

Coordinate

It goes without saying that you need a single tool to coordinate work. A place to break big goals down into small steps, assign them to people, and follow their progress.

Just like with communication, there are dozens of options.

Do I have my favorite tool? Sure, but it doesn’t matter. The best one for your team fits your type of work, your team, and the context in which you operate.

The best tool is the one that gets used by everyone.

The one that creates that same kind of alignment that sitting around that conference table did back in the day.

In most organizations, the parent company culture sets the standard for these things.

And the standard is anarchy.

Anarchy kind of worked when you all sat in the same room for a project. When you chatted randomly at the coffee machine, shared lunch, and heard each other’s challenges.

We both know that misalignment and poor communication cause 90% of the issues in your project.

So we need to adjust to the modern era of hybrid and/or remote work. And while creating that team room vibe is hard to recreate digitally, we can create the same result.

And while we’re at it, many other things evolve as remote work becomes the standard instead of the outlier.

Some project managers try to reinvent the wheel. But if you’d rather learn from a decade of experiments in dozens of different project teams and companies, my course Project Management Unraveled can help you save time and headaches.

Next month you can join almost 200 other project managers and learn step by step how I manage teams and stakeholders in the remote era of 2024.

Click here to claim your spot on the waitlist and you’ll be the first one to learn more + secure some extra bonuses.

Talk soon,
Jasper