Self-selection of teams in the virtual marketplace
How we coped with the topic of online facilitation
How we coped with online facilitation
Our organisation believes in self-managing teams. Each Scrum Team should be able to create valuable product increments without external help. Our teams don’t have dependencies with other teams. They can plan, execute and finish their work on their own.
When we started our Agile journey, we believed it would be in the spirit of Scrum to let the people self-select their place in the organisation. We did it with an event we call the Marketplace. I wrote about this some years ago. With the Marketplace, more than 150 people found their spot in 20 new teams.
The Marketplace is an event of 2 to 3 hours. Within this timeslot, you allow people to choose their team without management interference. In three selection rounds, the organisation is fully formed.
We repeat the Marketplace regularly. If we’d go back to assigning people to teams, we would undermine the culture that we set out to achieve. We had multiple Marketplaces over the years.
Then the pandemic hit and we all went virtual. This brought many challenges. The main challenge here was: how do you organize an online event with more than 75 people where you allow all of them to form and change teams? How do you allow them to interact, discuss, argue and decide? How are you going to have a seamless replacement of the physical team blueprints and name cards?
We initially thought it would be impossible to pull off a virtual Marketplace. But when time passed and we gained more experience in online facilitation, we saw opportunities and decided to simply do it. So, a couple of weeks ago, we facilitated our first-ever virtual Marketplace. With great success.
I will now share how we organised it and what our learnings were.
Understanding Miro and Zoom
I’m one of the three Agile Coaches in my vertical of Worldline. Keywords of our responsibilities are training, mentoring, coaching and facilitation. This calls for many face-to-face encounters. Engaging with people is our primary activity.
At the start of the pandemic, everything changed. All of a sudden, we were miles away from our colleagues and we needed to use devices to make contact. We had to re-invent everything we did. This reinventing happened gradually. Starting with facilitating training sessions.
We decided to focus on conducting Scrum and Agile training sessions, aiming to make them as interactive as possible. These training sessions gave us insights into how we could use Miro and Zoom. Miro’s options as a visual collaboration platform and Zoom’s features with breakout rooms opened other doors for us. We came to see how to organize events like an online Marketplace.
From onsite to online
We engineered an online version of the Marketplace that followed the exact same concept as the onsite version. Below you can find how we organised that onsite version of the event.
Self-organising a new organisation — the Marketplace
Let your people choose where they wish to work!medium.com
Instead of repeating these steps, I will clarify how we turned the Marketplace event into an online experience.
Preparation
Preparation is always crucial for a big event like this. But for an online event, it is even more important to have everything in order before the start. You wish to have the highest possible clarity and ease. People shouldn’t feel overwhelmed. Because then you lose them and in an online event, you will probably not get them back.
Most work will go into creating the collaboration board. Below is an example of our board on Miro. You will understand I blurred the content.
As you can see, the picture shows blueprints of 12 teams. This Marketplace was smaller in size than our first one. This didn’t have to do with being online. We could have handled more people if required.
For each team, the ideal size and distribution of skills are depicted in available spots. Additionally, we added information like the scope of the team, the manager and the Product Owner.
The middle area has all the people who need to find a spot. These cards with names, skills and pictures are the only parts of the board accessible to the participants. The rest of the board is locked. It serves as a canvas.
Another important part of the preparation is the video conferencing service. We use Zoom because we are used to the mechanics of the break-out rooms. What you need to prepare here is the sequence of the steps of the Marketplace and the organisation of breakout rooms. I suggest having a scenario prepared for this.
Then there’s the proficiency with Miro. You need to assume not everyone knows it well enough to participate in a meaningful way. This is why it is a good idea to create a small Miro practice board. If you send it a few days upfront, people have the opportunity to get acquainted with the tool.
The event
The online Marketplace event requires at least 3 people to facilitate:
You should have a speaker to guide the people through the process. In our Marketplace, that was me.
One person needs to manage Zoom. This was my colleague Corine.
The third facilitator should manage Miro. My other colleague Pieter V had the honours.
I started by clearly explaining every step upfront. And I spent about ten minutes to ensure everyone had access to the Miro board and was able to do what was needed. Throughout the event, I constantly assessed if participants understood the steps of the process.
I asked people to match their Zoom names with the names on the Miro cards. This allowed Corine to quickly move the right people into breakout rooms.
At every step, Corine and Pieter were in touch with me to align on their readiness for the next step.
Round 1
Then the fun began. The managers and Product Owners moved to a breakout room as they weren’t allowed to interfere. The participants could now drag their Miro cards to their position of choice. This was a spectacle. About eighty arrows flew over the Miro board simultaneously.
Regularly, I asked if people wished to discuss topics separately. Some wanted this and Corine would move them to a breakout room. Corine was prepared for the action of putting groups of people in multiple rooms.
At the end of Round 1, everyone came back to the main room.
Round 1 — Review
Then I explained that managers and Product Owners would remain in the main room and the participants would be sent to a breakout room. They could choose to have a break. After this has happened, I guided managers and Product Owners to assess the conflicts on the board.
I addressed the conflicts one by one. We had four situations in total. All of them had two people who wished to have the same spot. 90% of the organisation was already finalized. Within 20 minutes the vast majority of the picture was already painted.
But to have everything into place, the conflicts needed to be addressed. Managers and Product Owners discussed each conflict and left their observations on a virtual sticky note on the Miro board. When every conflict was discussed, everyone returned to the main room.
Round 2
First, I announced managers and Product Owners would go to a breakout room and Corine did so accordingly. Then I discussed the identified conflicts and asked the participants involved how they wished to proceed. They could choose to have a discussion, which meant Corine put them in a breakout room.
There were additional requests to have separate discussions. Corine would move them to a breakout room too. She was prepared for the action of putting groups of people in multiple rooms the whole time.
At the end of Round 2, everyone came back to the main room.
Round 2 — Review
I started this review by explaining that managers and Product Owners would remain in the main room and the participants would be sent to a breakout room and have a break if they choose to. Corine then opened the breakout room.
I went through the conflicts one by one. In round two, three conflicts were resolved and only one was left. 98% of the organisation was finalized at this point.
The managers and Product Owners discussed the remaining topic and left their observations on a virtual sticky note on the Miro board.
After this, everyone returned to the main room.
Round 3
Round 3 had everyone in the main room. I discussed the remaining conflict and asked the people involved how they wished to proceed. The participants could choose to have a discussion, which meant Corine would put them in a breakout room.
But this wasn’t necessary. The two people involved quickly said they had a solution to solve the puzzle. With this, we had reached the end of the Marketplace. We managed to have a new organisation within a bit more than two hours, with everyone involved in an online setting. A major achievement indeed.
The Miro facilitator
You may wonder what Pieter, Miro facilitator, had to do. I said we needed three facilitators, but didn’t mention his work when I talked about our experiences with the event. He wasn’t to be envied. As many people worked on the board Pieter had to make sure this board stayed intact.
There were plenty of accidental mess-ups. Pieter was on top of them. No one had noticed odd things happening on the Miro board because Pieter was doing all these rapid reparations.
Learnings
There were some interesting things we learned facilitating this event:
Prepare well and create a detailed scenario. This helps to remain in control.
Have a firm understanding of the usage of breakout rooms in Zoom.
It is vital to practice the event beforehand. Run different scenarios to see if the plan of approach and preparation of the tooling are ok. This includes using Miro and Zoom as it could happen in reality.
Explain the Miro board at the start and repeat this several times during the event. You can’t assume everyone understands after a first explanation.
Give people the room to find their way with Miro. Expect and allow mistakes and prepare your responses to predictable issues on this front.
Constantly invite people to bring forward their struggles and address these struggles immediately. You wish to minimize people’s frustrations with the tooling. The vent should appear seamless.
Explain exactly what happens when you end a phase and start a new one.
Don’t underestimate the tasks of the Miro facilitator. With this many people, there are always things going wrong while using Miro and the facilitator needs to repair these quickly.
Conclusion
We had great success with our virtual Marketplace. By preparing for the worst, we had an effective event. The Miro facilitator and Zoom facilitator were very busy. But they were happy with their meaningful contribution to have a seamless event.
The feedback from the participants was very positive. Managers, Product Owners and the people who had to find a spot in the organisation said they were surprised how well it all went.
As an added benefit, we were able to have this event with people from three different regions. This is something that would be impossible with an onsite Marketplace. We created a level-playing field. Everyone was equal.
I hope you got some inspiration from this write-up. We certainly got inspired by doing this. And we proved that there is a perfectly great alternative for an event that requires a lot of interaction. As long as you prepare well and use the right tools.