With increasing demands for flexible work models, many IT organizations have adapted to hybrid work that promises enhanced team productivity as well as work satisfaction. To achieve productive engineering practice, collaborative product innovation, and effective mentorship in the ensuing hybrid work, we introduce a workshop approach on co-designing for a hybrid workplace experience and provide implications for continuously improving collaborative software development at scale. The summary of this process can be found in an IEEE Software article under revision.
Co-design refers to the collective creativity of both designers and non-designers working together in the design process. As a participatory approach to design, it strives to cater various stakeholders' fuzzy needs as well as foster consensus, creativity and collaboration. Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Software Engineering (SE) research has increasingly demonstrated interest in co-designing for marginalized populations and underrepresented groups. In SE, prior co-design practice also enabled developers to articulate imprecise requirements in software-intensive development, and hence improve user satisfaction. While recent reports often indicate developers' diverse work preferences towards remote and on-site arrangements, co-design could be a suitable approach to address an organization's fuzzy needs during transitioning to a hybrid work model.
This repository provides the agendas and methodological guidelines for these co-design workshops.
- Recruiting and Preparation
- Workshop 1: Discovery and Co-design
- Workshop 2: Development Jobs-to-Be-Done
- Workshop 3: Experimental Designs and Piloting
- Concluding Remarks
- Acknowledgement
Participants in the co-design workshops should consist of a variety of software engineers, UX designers, and product managers representing the major software development roles at the site. It is ideal that experience and functioning roles of participants can reflect the demongraphics of the office, but be aware that software developers' time are expensive. The number of participants varied from 17 to 22 across our three workshops at SAP.
This workshop is recommended in a large conference room with roundtable seatings, and equipped with whiteboard spaces and wall displays. If there are remote participants, collaborative design space is recommended, including SurfaceHub and Jamboard. LOTS of sticky notes will be used during these sessions. For a session size with 20 participants, two facilitators would be sufficient.
Agenda email and calendar invite need to be sent at least one week before the actuall workshop happen for coordinating time.
The first workshop was a daylong event for participants to co-design the site's hybrid experience, and set up initial action items for pilot experiments and improvements. To leverage participants' creative potentials, we incorporated this site's design thinking (DT) practice into the co-design process. For this SAP site, DT has been applied as a collaborative and iterative approach that explores and elaborates the value proposition of a product in early stages.
Its DT approach aims to establish empathy for end users, and reduce the likelihood of costly adaptations. Building upon DT's success with customer co-innovation, i.e., an SAP activity that connects software developers and product managers with customers and articulates business and technical requirements of a product, we anticipate improved co-design outcomes by leveraging participants' skills acquired from the site's reliable DT approach.
| Time | Description |
|---|---|
| 9:00 - 9:30 | Introduction and make teams |
| 9:30 - 10:00 | Understanding and Reframing the Challenge |
| 10:00 - 11:00 | 360 Research |
| 11:00 - 11:45 | Sythesis of research, persona, PoV |
| 11:45 - 12:00 | Check-in with the team |
| 12:00 - 13:00 | Lunch breaks |
| 13:00 - 14:30 | Validate HMW statements and ideation |
| 14:30 - 14:45 | Coffee breaks |
| 14:45 - 16:30 | Idea voting and prototype creation |
| 16:30 - 17:00 | EOD presentation of proposed solutions |
Facilitators introduce with current hybrid challenges and start asking questions of these three theme. The first step of this workshop was to understand, refine and reframe the underlying challenges for transitioning to hybrid at the site. Facilitator may encourage participants to raise questions about hybrid challenges, and record and paste these questions onto a collaborative space for team reviews. From this step, participant anchored the overall direction for how to address issues in hybrid work for this entire workshop. For instance,
-
Help the team to get more done, more efficiently
- What meetings and activities are optimal in the office vs. remote?
- Should we introduce a cap of meeting time & attendees of meetings?
- Is there room to streamline meeting cadences to be more intentional?
-
Increase team spirit & sense of belonging at work
- What would make onboarding more effective in a hybrid environment?
- How could we build bridges across different scrum teams? MMPs?
- What would build trust & comradery amongst teammates?
- What are opportunities for mentorship we could provide?
-
Optimize use of our available infrastructure
- What resources do we need available for collaboration?
- How should the office space be configured?
- What could be guidelines for when to come into the office?
- What office onboarding & how-to's should we provide to newcomers?
Finally, the facilitator aligns the overall obejective of this workshop:
create and follow through a mini research plan to design a way to work in which productivity and team spirit are optimal, and the available infrastructure is best leveraged for hybrid work.
The second step enabled participants to explore the needs of their target personas in a hybrid workplace. Personas have been widely used in design and DT projects as an approach to build empathy between users and designers. As a starter, facilitators can provide main persona examples, which should be based on existing roles at the site.
Participants can apply user experience research methods to enhance their persona's profile, for instance:
- Interview available teammates who aren't in the workshop.
- Review research articles (e.g., internal technical reports, research literature, and press articles on hybrid work, please see our list of public resource at here)
- Reivew and analyze competitors strategies towards hybrid work
- Review internal survey data collected from local teams
Therefore, participants can leverage a broad variety of curated research resources, whichever work best for them, to further elaborate on the underlying challenges of each given persona.
As participants conduct research, facilitators should remind them of taking notes for findings that stand out to them, and put the stickie notes on the collaborative white boards for team review and synthesis.
In the step, facilitators lead participants to review their team's notes on the whiteboard, create grouping of notes that overlap to common core themes. Then, each team create several Point-Of-View (POV) statements for their target persona to address specific persona needs, and grasp improvements insights. The POV statement often in a form of "As..., I need..., and so that..." For instance,
As a UX designer, I need a collaborative open space to run customer workshops with my team so that we can get maximum empathy and feedback from customers.
Then each participant elaborated their improvement with POV statements, and proceeded with a team discussion. Unactionable and irrelevant ideas will be excluded from this discussion. For each POV statement, participants in team basis elaborated the ideas and validate through HMW statements:
- How might we help the team to get more done, more efficiently?
- How might we optimize use of our available infrastructure?
- How might we increase team spirit & sense of belonging at work?
If the POV statement passes the HMW validation, team will ideate some action items to make the improvement. Each team come up with their top-team-rated ideas and create a concrete plan that included a set of action items for the organization to experiment and improve its workplace.
Each participant can vote five ideas that they would like to move forward (we recommend limit the number of votes to manage the number of action items, and thus the process is managable). After the voting activity, participants can prototype their ideas with a set of action items, including getting reactions to the action item set from co-design teammates, create mock floorplans of how the action get followed through, and discuss how the action set fits into the day-to-day activities of the team's target persona.
At the end of workshop, each co-design team can give a five-minute presentation of the ideas and prototypes by their group. The presentation should include answers to the questions like what are the ideas, how should it be implemented, and why did you take this direction? Each co-design can provide the presentation with their whiteboard, and the remote team can present within Mural.
The second workshop aims at specifying a focused action plan for an ideal hybrid workplace experience. Since the first workshop is expected to create diverse and overwhelming number of action items, the second workshop aligned design goals for a hybrid workplace experience around main development tasks. This alignment process is guided by a business strategy, Jobs-to-Be-Done, often adopt at this SAP site. This strategy aims for articulating the practical needs of end users and customers. Thus, this workshop could create an initial structure of hybrid schedule, and set tracking that monitored these items progressing.
| Time | Description |
|---|---|
| 10:00 - 10:30 | Tracking Action Item Progress |
| 10:30 - 11:00 | Introduce Stations for Collaboration Model |
| 11:00 - 12:00 | Design Your Perfect Experience |
The first step in the second workshop is to introduce and create tracking for top-rated action items generated in the first workshop. The tracking can be any form that is familiar with the organization's practice. Particularly, for our practice at SAP, we levearge the Kanban board in the organization's JIRA repository, where participants could create đź’ˇImprovementđź’ˇ tickets for their action items. Moreover, all members of the office should have the access to the board and thus could comment and keep track of the organization's progress with potential improvements.
Then the facilitators help participants to review Collaboration Model:
the site's software development standards for product management and engineering to discover, design and deliver product collaboratively.
Other organizations may apply their equavelance as long as this is similar standard for collaborative software development activities. According to this standard, the facilitator provides a category of activities as Stations, including,
- Getting Ready for Dev: Team refinement and Domain-Driven-Design;
- After it's done: Sprint reviews, restrospectives and celebrations;
- Heads-Down: solo work (coding, mockup design, writing requirements and usability testing);
- Outside workplace: customer workshops and design thinking workshops;
- Team building: outings, interest groups and games;
- Personal development: mentoring, shadowing and 1:1s.
The last step of this workshop is to guide participants to contribute to each Station. Participant fill the above form for each of these Stations to indicate:
| Station Attributes | |
|---|---|
| WHY | Goals and Triggers |
| WHEN | Ideal Frequency |
| WHO | Ideal Attendees/Audience |
| WHERE | Ideal Location/Room |
| HOW | Ideal Resource (tools and preparations) |
| WHAT | Ideal Outcomes |
Participants may place their recurring development activities into these Stations for an ideal workplace experience: distinguishing the activities that favor on-site from tasks that prefer remote and quiet environments.
The third workshop is another two hour event that aims to follow through challenging action items (we mentioned it as Game Plan according to Organization Design Process) and solicit teams to experience or experiment with hybrid schedules.
| Time | Description |
|---|---|
| 10:00 - 10:30 | Introduction, and Example of Experiment |
| 10:30 - 10:45 | Create Working Pairs and Assign to Topics |
| 10:45 - 11:45 | Pair Working Sessions |
| 11:45 - 12:00 | Review Experimentation Plan |
The first step is to review the action item tracking board and give examples of following through. Facilitators may organize participants to review the Kanban board together for several long-lasting and challenging issues. The facilitator introduces how to design a hybrid experiment plan of pushing forward for this type of issue, for instance, giving a detialed plan for progressing with actionable weekly goals. We used an example of optimizing on-site seatings for product neighborhoods.
Facilitators assign each existing topics of action items to at least two participants. Highly priorized topics are action items which have not been solved yet, and have received high numbers of votes earlier on. Participants may pair up with colleagues of whom they have already known, and working pair including different development roles is preferred for more insights.
Then each small set of participants can start collaborating with their partners to define your experiment of improvements. We leverage the internal ticket system in JIRA. Each set needs to fill the Problem Statement, Target Goal, Root Cause Analysis, Countermeasures and Control. See definition of the following form:
| Plan Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Problem Statements | Describe the current state problem. |
| Target Goals | Describe the target goal of what would like to see in the future state. |
| Root Cause Analysis | Describe your strategy of discovering the root causes of problems in order to identify appropriate solutions. |
| Countermeasures | Describe countermeasures to resolve the issue. |
| Control | Describe the control or check to put in place to ensure the resolution works. |
In the last step, teams review the plan and prepare for rolling out. Each pair decide on a recurring date and time for weekly 30 minute standups. Each team shares their methods to carry out their experiment to resolve the issue, and set weekly goals and milestones. Meanwhile, participants may solicit some development teams to participant and experiment with hybrid experiments and schedules. During the rollout participants can continuously provide feedback on the Kanban board.
Co-design workshops are not the end! Following a continuous improvement process, facilitators needs to regularly re-visit their hybrid arrangement to calibrate organizational preferences and the site's collaborative development practice.
Main contributors of this repository are Zhendong Wang, Kayla Fathi and Tobias Schimmer. If you have questions with this co-design approach, please do not hesitate to contact us.
In addition, our special thanks to,
- Yi-Hung Chou,
- Jack Taylor,
- Ralf Geiser,
- Peter Colligan,
- David Redmiles,
- Rafael Prikladnicki,
- anonymous reviewers and associate editors from IEEE Software,
- and anonymous participants at SAP Eureka, NPB office, for making this work possible!
For citing its IEEE paper:
@article{wang2022co,
title={Co-designing for a Hybrid Workplace Experience in Software Development},
author={Wang, Zhendong and Chou, Yi-Hung and Fathi, Kayla and Schimmer, Tobias and Colligan, Peter and Redmiles, David and Prikladnicki, Rafael},
journal={IEEE Software},
year={2022},
publisher={IEEE}
}
Issues and pull requests are always welcome ❤️.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
