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Best practices for WeSalute Documentaion

Documentation​

Ideation​

What is ideation? It is the formation of ideas or concepts. Ideation supports the process where you can generate ideas and solutions through methods such as: sketching, prototyping, brainstorming, and a wealth of other ideation techniques. WeSalute wants to set you up for success by teaching you the workflow that will help facilitate productive, effective, innovative and fun ideation sessions.

Below is the workflow on the design thinking process. Using this method will create organization, structure, and it will support you and your team to collaborate on ideation.

Ideation Helpful Tips​

  • Ask the right questions

  • Increase the innovation potential of your solution

  • Bring perspectives and strengths to your Team Members

  • Uncover unexpected areas of innovation

  • Create volume and variety in your innovation options

How to Prepare​

  • **Prepare Before the Storm. **When you are about to venture into stormy territory, we know we need to prepare for a bumpy ride and take extra provisions so that we come out on the other side and arrive at our destination unscathed. An ideation process such as Brainstorming or Challenging Assumptions is no different. Wandering into a Brainstorm without preparation is asking for trouble. You may inadvertently damage your team's perception of ideation and scar them for future creative activities. You could also damage team cohesion by going into a situation like this and causing team members to fall out with each other due to a brainstorming session gone wrong

  • Gather and document ideas (Confluence)

  • Invite Team Members to contribute (it's okay if they opt out)

  • Perform business analysis

  • Gather data, provide context for future stages (Amplitude, Looker, Analytics, Feedback)

  • If available, provide comparable workflows and case studies

Creating Ideation​

  • Provide a narrow focus

  • Frame the problem as a problem statement

  • Inspire your team

  • Guide your innovation efforts

  • Inform criteria for evaluating competing ideas

  • Lure and captivate your team's attention

  • Ask yourself is it valid, insightful, actionable, unique, narrow, meaningful, and exciting

Scalability​

What is scalability?  Scalability is the ability of a project, or other undertaking to be able to adapt to larger demand by allowing greater supply. Creating any kind of process requires steps --- understanding the ultimate desired outcome, planning out the steps to get there, testing the process, and implementing the process.

But what makes a scalable process different​

  1. A scalable process can withstand a number of factors and stressors. It can handle volume of teammates or contributing parties --- and it combines efficiency with relevance where only the most important steps are part of the process.

  2. A scalable process enables Team Members to grow either on or around the process. A scalable process keeps a facet of the business as predictable as possible, and that enables other teams, product lines, or service lines to increase output in some way.

How scalability works​

  1. Understanding the current processes in place

  2. Identifying their success gaps

  3. Automating the processes as much as possible

  4. Iterating on the process

Understanding the current processes in place​

How many times have you ever jumped the gun and assumed you understood the problem? And then, after you implement the solution, you realize just how off-target you actually were. The first step is always taking the time to understand the details of the process being followed --- even if you wouldn't currently call it a "process" and even if it's truly a terrible or slow one. Digging deep into what tools and technologies you can leverage and when, and understanding the dependencies between teams.

Identifying their success gaps​

With a scalable process, you need to be able to uncover the main success gaps in the existing process. The success gaps will determine what "levers" you can pull to adjust the existing process into an infinitely more scalable one.

Success gaps could potentially fall in a number of efficiency areas

  1. Time --- the existing process takes too much or too little time

  2. Cost --- the existing process costs too much to support or it has an undesirable opportunity cost

  3. Resources --- the existing process doesn't have enough resources, the right resources, or the right technologies or tools

Automating the process as much as possible​

What makes a process truly scalable is its ability for Team Members to produce more of a desired outcome or predictably for a faster and better outcome. The best way to do that is workflow automation.

The best workflow automations are the ones you don't have to remember the next step to do. Instead, you'd rather focus on getting work done without stressing about the process itself.

Iteration on the process​

WeSalute supports iteration and improvements because it is so powerful in the workflow automation. The Iterating process can quickly help Team Members identify how to fill those gaps through creative ideas on improvement.

For example, this step is important because a sales process might need new ideas on how to add value to selling points to capture customers attention. Therefore, we must focus on what process needs to be changed and implemented to resolve ongoing issues from reoccurring.

All Team Members should be contributing creative ideas daily on how to improve workflow automation so we can focus our time on other projects that need attention.

Transparency​

Transparency in our remote-first culture can mean openness, sharing, and communication. In a team environment you must be transparent for remote work to work. 

What makes a workflow Transparent?

One major consideration of remote teams is having enough transparency to ensure Team Members can work well together. Some teams may encounter difficulties with working in different time zones, others simply don't know exactly the best ways to connect so that team members have adequate access to each other while working, and that updates and changes can be easily made to projects in a timely manner. Productivity can suffer when transparency is not present. Here are three ways that a team leader can make transparency a priority, and increase productivity at the same time.

  1. **Transparent Communication: **All Team Members should efficiently communicate with one another throughout completing team projects through simple communication. There are several communication channels (Slack, Confluence, Jira, Google Suite, etc), but determining how communication should look for your team is important. For example, real time video chat may not work if your teams consist of members around the globe in different time zones. Email may lead to delays in responses or team members being left off of threads. Fortunately, WeSalute supports you with tools for communication like (Slack, Confluence, Jira, Google Workspace, Google Meet, etc) that keep track of all Team Members' contributions, comments, and questions. The goal is to have all Team Members make it a habit to check daily communication channels, then ideas and issues can be addressed seamlessly.

  2. **Documenting Accountability: **At WeSalute all Team Members have access to see their teams daily work updates in (Slack, Confluence, Jira, Google Workspace, etc). Tracking progress is important for any project, and increasing transparency by making team members accountable for their work output can help keep team morale high and productivity at good levels.

  3. **Using the Right Tools: **Workflow management tools (Slack, Confluence, Jira, Google Suite, etc) are helpful for keeping things on track. Sharing documents, allowing for simultaneous editing, collaborating, and having conversations can all help to organize virtual teams and keep projects progressing. Again, these are tools that help to increase transparency, without which many projects stall or tank completely.

Transparency Expectations from Team Members​

Remote Makers:

  • Share everything you're working on and don't be afraid to toot your own horn.

  • Write everything down in a shared space and remember that the written word is your friend.

  • Be intentionally social & socialize virtually.

  • Communicate well. Communicate often. There's no such thing as over communication

As a remote Manager

  • Be super clear when setting expectations and giving feedback. Try not to surprise your team by building up a list of things you want to give out about.

  • Make yourself even more accessible in a remote environment since we cannot be in the same room.

  • Encourage (or force) video calls. We have cameras in ALL our devices for a reason. 

  • Communicate well. Communicate often. There's no such thing as over communication.

Repeatability​

A repeatable workflow is a process that consists of a series of tasks that generally need to be completed in a specific sequence. Think of it as work flowing from one stage to the next until it is finished and then repeating itself for the next reoccurrence.

Repeatable workflows are useful to ensure that important processes are done the right way each time. For example, you may want to have a repeatable workflow for onboarding new Team Members to ensure that all new Team Members get the information, policies, and resources they need to do their jobs.

All repeatable workflows should be documented in Confluence where all Team Members have access to viewing the workflow and identifying who is responsible for what task. Documenting workflows in Confluence will keep repeated workflows updated and prevent any steps in the workflow from falling through the cracks. WeSalute encourages Team Members to improve, perfect and update workflows.

Benefits of repeatable workflows

  • Keeps an audit trail
  • You can add to or take away
  • You can continually catch errors and stop errors from reoccurring
  • Creates structure
  • Reliability
  • Consistent team work

What tasks are repeatable

  • Website builds from initial project review to launch
  • Website software installations
  • Security checklists
  • Content updates that require specific steps
  • Troubleshooting steps
  • How to handle a security issue
  • Website launches
  • Post-launch follow-up with clients
  • Archiving a project