Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff: Notes from the Sun.com customer experience team.

My last two posts have talked about some of the benefits to be had from supporting remote or distributed design, and also some of the challenges. We think Sun does a really good job at supporting remote work, and that because of this program our design team able to serve teams around the world. Now, here are a few distilled best practices from our group to yours.

Establish a good tool set

"Use tools that support/encourage exchange of information across group and help to establish a common knowledge baseline," advises one person in my group. "That means aliases, dashboards, concalls, repository of shared/living tools and docs, workflow management." Some of the tools we've found most effective:

• Instant messaging is the equivalent of  popping into the office... except it works across the globe. "Instant messenger is the best tool ever. I use it constantly to stay in contact with people."
  
• Use some kind of call-routing and management system like Accessline. "I like being able to route it anywhere and call anyone from it," says one of our team.
  
• Use a web-based tool like Jitterbug to handle inbound queues of design requests.
  
• Create wikis so that a whole project team can contribute to the working design documents (user stories, flows, use cases, wireframes, etc)
  
• Establish conventions for quickly sharing images (JPEGs etc) so people can look at and comment on designs. (This could just be email or instant messaging...)
  
• Set up collaboration and knowledge management web sites on your intranet and extranet so you can share designs and ideas with other teams and vendors.
• Use remote web viewing, remote screen, and whiteboarding tools, when possible.
• Set up remote video viewing of usability tests so folks can watch a test even if they're not in a physical lab.
  
• Make sure you have clear design and project processes so you can tell that everything is on track.
  
• Meeting management and planning (especially documenting minutes, decisions, and action items and having them available for reference)
  
• Do regular walk-throughs of in-process designs; this is a good practice anyway, and works especially well online.
  

Foster good group communication

It's a little easier for things to get confused when you're half a world away, or even in the same time zone but remote. Here are a few tips from our team about how foster good communication:

• Do regular con-calls. Encourage roundtable discussion
• Use the phone. Make and take time to socialize a little even if it's only by phone
  
• Don't use email to work through interpersonal issues or touchy situations. pick up the phone asap
• As ever, clear team and individual roles and goals should be accessible to all
• Monitor quality and flow of communication like a vital sign
• Actively tune methods and adjust. Experiment and discuss

Meet face to face, too

• Meet your teams upfront. This will make it easier to work together.
• Set standards, policies and practices around when to meet in person as well as rules of engagement. Make planning meetings on campus easy. This should also include team building and team development (User Experience-specific as opposed to project).
  
• Try to meet regularly as well. At least 3 times a year.
• Group collaboration is still important at times
  
• Be sure that your distributed program emphasizes that remote/distributed employees are included in everything so that they don't feel left out.  Our BU at Sun has been very good about doing this.
  

Create a nice work environment whereever you are

Here's another nice observation: Move around a bit so you change your environment. "Though I mostly work from the office, I have an interesting setup at home.  My official office is in the finished basement, but I don't love it there (it's a bit cool, especially in the summer).... so I often work up on our dining room table or on the kitchen table.  Lighting is bright and is a nice periodic change to my office space."

Encourage WFH culture in your group

If you run a web group or a design group, I really encourage your looking at supporting distributed design and remote work. Once you have the tools, processes, and culture in place for employees, you will also find that these things work well in making your vendors more efficient and accessible. Here are some last bits of comments and advice from our group:

• "Sun is best-in-class in terms of WFH (work from home) in my opinion just all around; many companies don't even allow their employees to do this type of arrangement, which contributes to both productivity and high employee morale in my opinion."
• "Sun's distributed environment contributes to the success of it's wfh program; we are very geographically distributed to begin with, so wfh doesn't really change that much in terms of team collaboration."
• "Sun's wfh program is excellent in terms of equipment and monthly expense reimbursement. The only downside is when the equipment gets outdated, there's not a real systematic plan to keep the equipment upgraded."
• "For WFH in general I feel that an all or nothing approach is better per individual. Allowing only one day or two a week of WFH seems that it would waste a lot of time in coordinating communication and transferring files, etc (when employees rely on workstations instead of laptops). Also i feel when you work from home one day a week it's harder to consider your home space as "work". this can be true for both the employee or their family. "
  
• "Create a plan for transitioning the capital costs from campus to people who work at home for things like chairs, phones, desktop printers, sm whiteboards."
• "If people are distributed outside a small area, plan a travel budget. The team will still need to see each other face to face and conduct research and usability studies collectively. (You will probably save at least $10,000/yr per person on office space and facilities, so you'll still be ahead even with some travel costs.)"
• "Research equipment thoroughly before making it available to the WFH employees.  Choose sturdy, reliable machinery and make it easy to get repairs or replacement parts."
• "Ideally, provide choice to employees as to what tools they will use (but standardize on critical pieces)."
• "Create an accepting culture - it is OK when you hear a dog bark in the background."
• "Create a culture of remote work. It's difficult to succeed when only a  few people on the team are distributed. It works very well when you reach critical mass!"

Leave a comment on what your best practies are for "Designing from Anywhere."

Tunes: Beatles: Julia

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