Remote collaboration, project planning & tracking strategies for product design teams
Using Design Sprints, Gantt Chart and JIRA Design Board to hack success and run in an agile manner while providing transparency of timelines and design process to other stakeholders and team members.
One of the common issue that I have noticed in any company- small or big, is the lack of clarity in terms of expectations, deliverables, possible deadlines and cross functional planning/distribution of work, progress updates to stakeholders regarding projects. Given the COVID times, it’s more required than ever to have plan and tools for easy collaboration and execution.
I believe, for any project to succeed it needs to be kicked-off in the right manner, involving all the required members to be aligned for the same goal & thus be set on a road to success for the company & themselves.
This is where Design Sprint, Gantt Chart and JIRA Board comes in like a saviour
Design Sprint gives a process and direction to progress in either individually or in Teams. Gantt Chart helps put down ball park estimates & JIRA not only provides progress visibility to stakeholders but also helps in planning daily/weekly tasks along with backlog building basis of task completions in set timelines. You can also attach respective documentation for each task and maintain a history for each project.
Enough of talks, so how do we really do it?
Stage 1: Planning
Step 1
Quick categorisation/identification of the projects for the quarter (ask from Product Managers, Project Managers, Design Managers, basis of Company/Team OKR’s)
Step 2
Work on a Design Plan basis of the inputs provided by the Design Manager/ Process Designer/Design Ops or on your own word document.
This is where you can brainstorm for trying out new/ideal processes for any of the Design Thinking Stages & make sure of how to achieve the best outcome, keeping the creativity & innovation alive.
You can refer for some of the best Design Methods in the Google Design Sprints Kit or the book Design Methods. (Please do recommend other sources of design methods in the comments below).
Step 3
Share the Design Plan with the PM’s, DM’s regarding the projects (P1,P2..) with a ballpark time estimate like (3 weeks or 2 sprints, etc) and get the right priorities for the project. Asking for priorities is also a key responsibility of any individual or team.
You can also identify priorities by doing analysis in terms of impact vs effort vs feasibility and then applying the 80/20 rule to set the priorities.
Step 4
Create a Gantt Chart on Excel or use one of the Popular tools to add time estimates for each project and its respective tasks.
This also helps in overlapping some stages of the other project to keep up the pace and achieve our goals. At this stage, you can also estimate individual team member’s capacity & distribute the work if needed.
Also, remember to share the plans at each stage with your Product Managers, Design Managers & other team members to make sure everyone is aligned to the right expectations & there is clear prioritisation in terms of deliveries expected.
Stage 2: Customising JIRA Board for Design Projects
Step 1: Define Issue types for Sub-Tasks of Design Process Highly inspired from GS, I first set up the various Issue Types within the Project Settings:
1. Understand/Research
2. Define
3. Sketch
4. Ideate
5. Decide
6. Prototype
7. Validate
Break down your tasks into, understanding PRD, understand stakeholder reqs using HMW, user research, competitors study, etc & then attach the respective documentation to the ticket.
Step 2: Create Issue Types basis of Projects.
In the above example, we have used only 1 Issue (Project) Types: Epics.
In case of multiple Product Teams, it’s best to use the following categorisation, to provide requirements across teams & cover user stories- use case simultaneously for smoother shipment of big releases.
Themes are large focus areas that span the organisation.
Initiative are collections of epics driven towards a common goal.
Epics are chunks of work that can be broken down into smaller tasks
Stories are short requirements or smaller tasks
These could also be co-related to Bugs/Stories (User Stories),
Features (Epics),
Redesign(Initiative),
Re-branding (Theme)
Step 3: Setup the Design Board
We categorised it into 4 stages:
1. To Do (Can also be managed/edited by Managers based on need)
2. Understand
3. In Progress
4. Completed
Stage 3: Maintaining and Tracking
Basis of each project, you can create the corresponding Themes/Initiatives/Epics/Stories on JIRA under the roadmap section and then create the corresponding tickets (tasks with the respective issue type filter) and pick it up as per your timelines/sprints.
Feel free to assign tasks to other members (User Researcher, Interaction Designer, Conversation Designer) of the project to enable collaboration.
The items that don’t make it to the completed board remain in the backlog and can be catered to as and when possible. Jira also auto-creates a timeline of the project on basis of when the tickets/tasks were picked up & completed.
Stage 4: Get started and drive your team and the project to success
Basis of individual tasks or collaborative tasks, pick those up during your weekly sprint and mark them as complete move closer to project completion and success. Make Product Design the key to the company’s success.
If you liked this article or found it helpful for yourself or your team, please show some love and leave comments to let me know how it helped. Also, I would love to hear about the process followed by you or your design team and how are you managing it during these remote times.
Thank you!
