The Art of Collaboration in Digital and Physical Spaces with Ondrej Popanek

Uncover the secrets to seamless collaboration in mixed realms of digital and physical workspaces with Agile guru Ondrej Popanek, all the way from Stockholm. In our fascinating talk, we'll navigate through the adaptations of Agile techniques to the pulsating world of fashion design at H&M and reveal how tools like Miro play a crucial role in uniting teams scattered across the globe. Ondrej brings a wealth of knowledge on tailoring daily scrums and Agile methodologies to suit the diverse array of creative minds he coaches, emphasizing the necessity of flexibility and innovation in maintaining effective collaboration and communication among multi-time zone teams.

As we traverse the complex landscape of large organizations, we'll dissect the challenges that come with a labyrinth of meetings and how initiatives like 'Tuesday free meetings' at H&M are rejuvenating productivity. I'll also spill the beans on the delicate dance between too many digital tools and user preferences, where the art of balancing documentation with dynamic collaboration comes into play. The chapter on tool restrictions versus user choices will leave you considering the security stakes of software and the resistance that can occur when shifting from old-school methods to digital efficiency. Join us for this episode, where practical strategies and personal anecdotes converge to refine your collaborative playbook, no matter the size of your sandbox.

Follow Ondrej on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andre-ondrej-papanek/

Check out Ondrej's offerings:
https://www.itmanagement.consulting/

Check out Ondrej's templates in Miroverse:
https://miro.com/miroverse/profile/ondrej-papanek/

Transcript

Mark Metze: 0:06

Welcome to the Agile Within. I am your host, mark Metz. My mission for this podcast is to provide Agile insights into human values and behaviors through genuine connections. My guests and I will share real-life stories from our Agile journeys, triumphs, blunders and everything in between, as well as the lessons that we have learned. So get pumped, get rocking. The Agile Within starts now. Welcome back to another episode of the Agile Within. This is your host, mark Metz. I want to welcome to the show Andre Popanek. Welcome, andre.

Ondrej Papanek: 0:49

Hi, mark, it's my pleasure to be here as your guest on this podcast. Thank you to be here with you.

Mark Metze: 0:58

Andre is an Agile coach and a scrum master and he's on a mission to coach and or mentor and resolve problems. He has a passion to help people and he does this through his creative outlet, using custom retrospectives and other means. And Andre hails from Stockholm, sweden. So, andre, suppose I were coming to Stockholm for one day, and one day only. What is one thing that you would say I could not miss doing?

Ondrej Papanek: 1:32

Well, you know, beginning of December we have kind of the noble, noble, yeah right. So we have a lot of people who are listening to the noble piece and I believe it's quite important to visit the noble house when you can learn more about noble prices. And also connected to that is the noble museum, where you can see a lot of things, what you cannot see when it's in television, right, what they eat and the history, everything around it. I believe that's a very good representation of Stockholm and Sweden itself.

Mark Metze: 2:13

Sounds wonderful. Well, I can't wait to make a trip. Not sure when that's going to be, but if I do, I'll definitely put that on the list and and let you know so I can drop by and we can meet in person. Absolutely, that would be great. Well, today's episode is titled the art of collaboration in digital and physical spaces. So, andre, why is collaboration? Why would you consider that an art?

Ondrej Papanek: 2:44

I believe collaboration is the art, because these days we have kind of hybrid environment, right, and some of us are in the office and some of us are working from home. I think this is even harder. To make the collaboration more effective and to find the balance. You know which tools we can use and how to collaborate together is an art. Once we achieve this kind of good level of collaboration, then we are in good level where the collaboration is very effective and not just, you know, an other meeting or another tool.

Mark Metze: 3:24

Basically, Well, there, I want to take this conversation in a in a certain direction, because you mentioned tools, and when we're in a hybrid environment, we have to leverage tools to be able to communicate remotely, because we're not face to face. Right, what's your take on some of the tools that are used in some of the companies that you've worked with, maybe some that have worked well, some that haven't worked well, and the amalgamation of all the tools together?

Ondrej Papanek: 3:58

Well, absolutely this good question.

Ondrej Papanek: 4:01

I think it's also very important last two years.

Ondrej Papanek: 4:06

Well, I was working in one of the Swedish fashion brand, r&m H&M, and I find out over there the collaboration is more important because I had opportunity working with designers and their mind is like a bit different from others because they like to create something and then with a visual, and for visual people is very important you know, to try something to represent, you know from the others, and that was the time when I discovered Myro digital whiteboard and from that time I love Myro, the collaboration.

Ondrej Papanek: 4:50

It's much better with Myro because you can have it, you know, on your computer or desktop, even tablet, or even some interactive digital rooms or in physical rooms. They have, you know, big TV which can be touch screen or as well integrated, and you can have Myro there just working very well. And I believe the Myro at H&M play even bigger roles because, like every quarter, we had a kind of the quarterly planning, bi planning, and for it was very important to have something digital because our team was distributed across three continents and different time zones and you know if you have to represent something on the whiteboard in the office and a Sharia web company would not work, so that's why Myro is a great tools for this collaboration.

Mark Metze: 5:53

So there's Myro or Myro, there's also Myro, which is very similar to that, and I'm more in the Myro camp than I am the Myro or the Myro camp. I tell a funny story, though, because my daughter, when she was in college, she had a professor that was very adamant about Myro and loved it, and then she had someone else that stepped in for the professor one time and was into Myro, and she got confused one time and told the class to go into Myro not Miro, but Miro, m-u-r-o and had the class totally confused on which tool she was being used. So, yeah, the two of those companies should have gotten together and maybe made their names a little more distinct than that, but so, on that case, have you ever so? This was a group of fashion designers that you had working together using Miro. So tell us a little bit more about how they collaborated together. Give us a visual this is an audio podcast Give us a visual of what they were communicating about on this board.

Ondrej Papanek: 7:12

Well, we communicated during the day of week many times on this board and one of the things was daily scrum stand up review time, right, and I find out, like we used to have a canchera from the earth, you know, and see the spring back lock right and see what happened yesterday and what we're focusing today, right. And later I found out this form of daily scrum was not only outdated but also not efficient Because, as I mentioned, I liked coaching and when I had one-to-one coaching with each of the members of the scrum team, turns out, this daily scrum was kind of satisfying, right, Because many times someone was sick, had an out-of-the-world, there was an independent team of other team members and they were not able to kind of, you know, say like what's going on, right, so coming in the second time in the week and say there's nothing new because it's not my problem, someone is sick, you know, it was kind of status meeting and I wanted to change this right and also get rid of the kind of outdated version of this daily scrum. As with the new scrum guy, from 2020, we should focus, you know, to deliver the spring go instead of asking, you know, standard questions. So it was a great place, you know, to put in my role, instead of a Chaira and create something more, you know, interactive, because you know there used to be PO presenting the Chaira on, you know, sharing environment, right, sharing screen via Teams. So what I did, I took kind of ownership of the daily scrum and I came up with the kind of template for daily scrum and I called it a daily scrum, football.

Ondrej Papanek: 9:21

Right. Imagine you have a football player, one team, not a kind of other team, again, just one team. Right, you have the football that you're holding and when you have the football ball in your hand, you actually answer like what are you contributing to achieve the spring goal? Is there something you know, what you can improve? And once you are done, you give the football to other person, speaking, you know, from other perspective, and once the second person is finished, can give the ball to other person. There's not any specific order, only the person you give the ball, the new person, so the other person can speak out. And once this is done and kind of daily scrum is finished, sometimes the protocol, my additional question, but it's more interactive because they decide where the football ball going to. Right, there's no specific order, they can decide Because it gives them a bit more kind of gamification form of the scrum.

Mark Metze: 10:37

That's interesting. So did you have some sort of I'm guessing at the end of the board where you had the goal? Did you have a like? The sprint goal was represented by the goal.

Ondrej Papanek: 10:51

Exactly so in the middle of the football field was a kind of spring goal for the sprint right and some of them they can also put them stick here so they can follow up right and see during the day and some of them they memorize it. So I think that's really improved the daily scrum when I was there and I come up with this solution. And actually this template was selected in top templates for 2023, which was quite nice to me.

Mark Metze: 11:33

Oh wow, Congratulations.

Ondrej Papanek: 11:35

Thank you, and the template is used until today at H&M.

Mark Metze: 11:43

Wow. So, and just to be clear, so this was across, this was you won this award. Across all of of Miro right.

Ondrej Papanek: 11:55

Well, on my words, there's a lot of creators right, and there was like 100 templates selected to be like the best templates for 2023. And I was one of them.

Mark Metze: 12:11

Okay, all right. Well, you should be proud. That's awesome, thank you. So question for you, andre was there any issues of keeping the Miro board in sync with the Jira board?

Ondrej Papanek: 12:27

Well, my intention was to get rid of the Jira board right. Oh okay, because that was like such a meeting. So that was my biggest motivation. But anyway, if you want to have a kind of stories or tasks from the Jira in Miro, it's not a problem because there is a plugin which you can import a stickies and use the stories from the upcoming or current spring into Miro.

Mark Metze: 13:00

Very nice, very nice, and is that a free plugin?

Ondrej Papanek: 13:05

Well, that is a free plugin. Yes, that's correct. There are, I believe, multiple plugins, not just one, and this also brings like also opportunity to have the spring planning in Miro right. Basically what you can do, you can have a template for spring planning and you can write a sticky just the headline or of the user story in Miro Once you create it. There is a plugin which, once you create it in Miro, at the same time it's created in Jira right, and later on you can come back to Jira and adjust user stories.

Mark Metze: 13:55

I see.

Ondrej Papanek: 13:56

And other things, story points and also other things, but basically you can start in Miro, which is great.

Mark Metze: 14:05

Really cool. Really cool, All right. Well, I want to ask you, Andre this was a company where it sounds like you had a lot of success. I'm not sure what size company this was, but do you have any stories to tell on some large corporations and some of the challenges that you faced with collaboration and tools working in large organizations?

Ondrej Papanek: 14:36

So this was big organization, because H&M has over 100,000 employees. Oh, right, H&M yep, yes, and I was H&M group and at that time we had around 10,000 employees, so it was one of the biggest companies we've ever used to work in the past.

Mark Metze: 14:55

So were there any challenges with communication within an organization that large? Yes, surely you had to have some, especially as you branched out to different departments, different teams.

Ondrej Papanek: 15:10

Absolutely. Let me have a few problems. I think one of the biggest problems was like a lot of meetings I'm talking meetings outside of Scrum events even for so many of them and people making decision-makers. They were stuck in meetings, to be honest, and I think that was a problem for the people who kind of delivering tasks, right for designers in the Scrum team. They wanted to talk with some representatives from other departments, they want to talk to other product owners. It was quite difficult because many times head of innovation product owner, they were stuck in meetings and their agenda was full so it was quite difficult to schedule a meeting with them. On the other side, people have to wait for a few days. Well, it might also affect your delivery, right. So it was difficult. So what they achieved was like in our organization unit they came up with Tuesday free meetings. So that's mean.

Ondrej Papanek: 16:31

Tuesday free meetings okay, yeah, so that's mean that day you don't have any meetings outside of your team. You're only allowed to have meetings in a way we want to have, I don't know me and product owner right, or designer, product owner on the internet level, not on the external level. And plus, on top of it, they also have some more free on Friday.

Mark Metze: 16:55

Gotcha, gotcha, and I'm sure there was much cheering and celebration whenever that was instituted right.

Ondrej Papanek: 17:06

It was they get more time for themselves. And you know, mostly you know work on something where it was more valuable, not just the meetings right, they wanted to really deliver tasks which kind of contributing to deliver a spring call again.

Mark Metze: 17:25

And how was that enforced? Maybe enforced is a too strong of a term, but how did people stay honest? Did they block off their calendar on Tuesday so that nobody could schedule a meeting, or how did they make that happen?

Ondrej Papanek: 17:41

Well, it was promoted from the top managers. That was approved. So that was great. Even sometimes it was hard. You know, say no when you get invites on Tuesday. But you know you say no if you get invites or, as you mentioned, you can block your Tuesday. So when you get invite, automatically it's reject.

Mark Metze: 18:07

I can just envision certain type A individuals, shall we say, sending a message leading off similar to.

Ondrej Papanek: 18:19

I know we're not supposed to have Tuesday meetings, but yeah, the bad was like a section during you know a special, when it's coming, PIPaNIC, right? Oh yeah, Right, Because you put it on the port for your epic, not on the epic port for your epic. So with all the product owners, right. And then later you try to make your own epics with your team and you know, and you have to plan a few stringing advance, right, Because they want to see what you will deliver, right, With other teams. So that was one of the Tuesday when it was very difficult to block your free time.

Mark Metze: 19:05

Gotcha. So, andre, I'm curious to know do you have experiences where either big companies or possibly small companies, even medium sized companies, where the number of tools Became a hindrance, the number of communication tools?

Ondrej Papanek: 19:29

Absolutely. I was in one of the company last year when I came and I was shocked. They have triple meetings compared to H&M when I was before. It was one obstacle and the company has, in heavy industry, big vehicles. This is a regulation where they apply for patents, try to make a product and there's also big digitalization. At the time on their platforms they documented everything, even making notes in the meetings. I'm talking about scum events. It was crazy. I think there was one documentation, one digital tool. Second was somewhere in a confluence. There was a third one, internet tools. It was difficult. Not only that, there was like on the general level you have to kind of connect everything together. You have to mention like for this story there is a link which gives you access to confluence. Second link to the digital kind of Y board. Third thing, to Internet documentation tool. You had to do it for almost every user story. Imagine you updated your user story and you have to also update other three different places.

Ondrej Papanek: 21:18

There was one of the company. When I find out they have a chunk yard of tools.

Mark Metze: 21:26

Junk yard of tools. That's a good. I like that.

Ondrej Papanek: 21:29

Yeah, I think if you are in the big enterprise companies and there's a lot of decision making and also documentation is very important. I think it's kind of important to step in and find out what is the balance between documentation and having effective collaboration.

Mark Metze: 21:56

Good point. So that is true. So I'm going off my own experience in large organizations. But even in small organizations, my experience has been where things maybe aren't regulated as much Think of a startup, perhaps and you have people who have their favorite, their favorite tools that they like to use.

Mark Metze: 22:26

And as the company has its own problems and growing, standardizing on a set of communication and documentation tools isn't at the top of the list, it can get out of hand very quick because everybody has their own favorites. And I'll give you an example. A company that I worked for was a Microsoft shop and they received some benefits by being an official partner of Microsoft, and so they use Microsoft Teams and they found out that Microsoft Teams had a feature for documentation called pages, team pages. It's been a while so I could be getting it wrong, but you could do some very easy, quick and dirty editing using Markdown on these Microsoft Teams pages. Well, the company had a SharePoint portal and wanted that to be their official place for documentation, to resign, but some of the developers thought it was much easier to navigate Microsoft Teams than it was SharePoint, so it didn't take long before the web to get spun out and the two were out of sync.

Mark Metze: 23:46

So even within the same vendor, we'll say, of Microsoft, they've got multiple tools that they could use to do this. You've got developers that have their own personal preferences and so we can get out of hand, not to mention all the SaaS tools that we have online that are available to us, whether it be gosh I'm thinking like Evernote or any number of note taking tools that developers or team members could be using. So how do you balance that? How do you balance that decision to be able to lock down tools so that you have a nice concise list that are supported for a company, but it's not so restrictive that people get frustrated and they just say, in your case of having to update the amount of hoops that you had to jump through to update a Jira ticket, I could imagine people would say, well, let's just not update it, let's just implement it as it is, because it's too much trouble to update it, so let's just go forward with it as it is. How do you balance that, andre?

Ondrej Papanek: 25:08

I believe balancing this in the startup environment, I think, is more difficult compared big enterprise companies, right, because usually startups, they figure a lot of things themselves and the decision is made on the management level, sometimes only on the teams level, as you mentioned. One thing my users don't know, it's like. Another one might be Discord, right, and communication at a company level might be based on emails only right. I think it should be clear communication, right From the managers or even founders what they should use. Right, because might out of control very quickly. But also I think they should listen, right, their scrum teams or developers what they like to use. It might be different from developers compared to sales department or HR, right, but at least the communication platform should be same for every department.

Ondrej Papanek: 26:21

And if the IT department and developers want to use Chira, they probably have to stick with it if they want to. Right, I think this is important to find the balance and have open communication. What's benefit us, what is good to use? And also not only that If you have one ticketing system, why you have to use another one? Right, instead, adjust one for one department and customize for other department. There is no need to have a service now instead of just for one department. It's just external layer of complexity and also handling where other data right.

Ondrej Papanek: 27:07

So, I say stick with one tools and some tools are more flexible than others and figure out what flexibility it gives to you, but also what you can adjust with yourself. Maybe in some plugins maybe there will be all kind of overview of the dashboard on top of it. That's my experience with startups. In enterprise there's a different question, different scenario, because there's a lot of regulation. They want to be sure the data are mostly stored offline and on their servers, or even in here in Europe. If it's something outside of European Onio, there's a big question mark, has to be investigated, has to be approved on the company level before that's allowed. That takes sometimes months, not weeks, months.

Mark Metze: 28:13

So that's a good point to bring up is you have to take into consideration the security concerns. So, as much as we like to think that a lot of these tools are secure, not all of them are. So companies do have to make difficult decisions to choose tools that that meet some rigor as far as being secure. I would just say, for those people out there, if you're frustrated because your company uses this tool and you really have your favorite sometimes it's not up to just favorites, but it really is a security is of the utmost concern, so that's something to keep in mind. That's something to keep in mind. Yeah, so, andre, so do you have any stories of any companies, maybe that picked the wrong tool that weren't as secure as they should be?

Ondrej Papanek: 29:25

That's a good question. I was working a long time ago in other company. They were very proud using open source special Linux.

Mark Metze: 29:41

Ah, yeah.

Ondrej Papanek: 29:44

Yeah, but you know it takes some time, you know, to get fixed, you know from the open source company and it's something connected to hardware and upgrade firmware or whatsoever. At that time I was working in Germany, Remember. We installed one of the open source versions of Linux. It was working, but there was a new upgrade of firmware which came up from the manufacturer order motherboard and so we upgraded the firmware on the motherboard and we find out the Linux distribution and getting a blue screen because they didn't upgrade it, the kernel of the Linux version of the BIOS, and it was not documented anywhere on the internet, right. So we spent hours, days and nights, you know, to look it up.

Ondrej Papanek: 30:52

What is the problem? And later my boss found out there's a problem with the Linux distribution. So a lot of Linux distributions are mostly from Czech Republic. I remember that day because I'm originally from Czech Republic. I contacted a company, I talked to them and we had a problem Can you help us? And that was basically a solution. The biggest kind of was the lost revenue from our customer, for each day the customers lost around 10,000 euros. So four days, you know, 40,000 euros was kind of out of focus because of this issue, right.

Mark Metze: 31:40

Oof, yeah. So pick your tools and pick your software very carefully, right?

Ondrej Papanek: 31:47

Exactly, and especially big companies, like before, you apply on the kind of you know on every department, like tested before, right In your testing environment. When it's work, then you're probably allowed to add a department later, you know to full scope, right. So it's also important testing in advance before you roll out everywhere.

Mark Metze: 32:14

The programs are good.

Ondrej Papanek: 32:17

Absolutely very important.

Mark Metze: 32:19

So, andre, have you ever encountered a case so you mentioned that Miro is one of your favorite tools have you ever encountered a case where you put a lot of effort into, let's say, a Miro template and the team was less than impressed? Maybe they were new to Miro and it was unfamiliar to them, and they didn't share your enthusiasm for the tool?

Ondrej Papanek: 32:47

Yes, I was one of the team. They were very geeky and I created a wonderful template that time and it was a great template. But I find out they came from stickies, you know, directly to a digital whiteboard and for them was a little bit kind of unknown environment, right. But I find out they didn't know how to.

Ondrej Papanek: 33:19

You know, if you're running retrospective, you address a few questions and then you have to pick it up like two or three most important issues you want to address and improve on the experience, right, they had a problem to do the dot voting on Miro and at that time I find out it was a problem with the compatibility of the web browser, because the time they were using it in the web browser instead of in the application and it was one of the issues and later also the team of their retrospective could be designed more suited for my team at that time. So, yeah, I think this is also important. You know, when you're creating retrospective, find out what your team likes, right, what is the company culture? You know, what are the things for it? I don't know, whatever might be food, books, movies, you know and then you can create retrospective with the team which resonates with them.

Mark Metze: 34:29

So what was your next step then? After that, with the team where the dot voting didn't work the way you thought it was going to? What did you do the next time different?

Ondrej Papanek: 34:41

So next time when I was running retrospective before I have kind of a walkthrough. How to use the tool was one thing, and second thing, I also send a kind of question area email and I chosen for topics and they have to answer which topics you know should be in the retrospective. And then was done almost every end of the sprint, right. So I had some few days to prepare and then I find out the topic where they choose. It's really something that they want to focus on. But this also helps me to create a team for the retrospective which is easy to connect with the problem or whatever they want to focus on the retrospective.

Mark Metze: 35:42

Very nice, so I could imagine there was some sense of ownership from the team with the format.

Ondrej Papanek: 35:49

Absolutely right Sometimes. You know, I mentioned one of the company. There was many of the meetings so in one of the perspectives they wanted to find out how we can reduce the numbers of meetings and also be more effective in our communication. So it was one of the retrospectives so came out we have a lot of stakeholders and other people on the screen and review right. So it was like over a hundred people invited on maybe and did person just show up. So we did the stakeholder mapping right in four sectors, like there's influence they give us, you know, funding, budget. They want to be just in form. So we kind of did that together as a team activity after the retrospective and from that time we reduced the people which show up on a screen review and also we recorded this every spring review so we send out a few people to recording so they can look it up and hear some questions.

Mark Metze: 37:05

Nice.

Ondrej Papanek: 37:06

Happy to come back to us.

Mark Metze: 37:09

Very nice. Well, andre, this has been a wonderful conversation. I feel honored to have you as a guest. As we start wrapping up here, I'm sure our guest will want to connect with you. So what are the best ways for our guest to connect with you?

Ondrej Papanek: 37:30

Absolutely. Thank you for mentioning this. So the best place to find me is on LinkedIn, so you can go there and search for Andre Papane. If you want to find out more templates in Miro, go to Miro and the section on Miroverse. Write my name and you will find all the templates over there. Otherwise, you can also find me on my webpage at wwwmanagemicconselting.

Mark Metze: 38:01

Very nice, and the templates that you have in the Miroverse are those free.

Ondrej Papanek: 38:08

Yes, they are free. You can use MyAerold for free. Let you to use free whiteboard. It's fine, it should be fine, and yeah, so it's free. Templates are free and MyAerold is also free.

Mark Metze: 38:29

Wow, that's very nice. So thank you for your contributions to the community. That's awesome. We'll put all this information in the show notes to make it easy for our listeners to access. As we close here, another episode of the Agile Within. This has been Mark Metz, with Andre Papinek. Join it very much. We'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us for another episode of the Agile Within. If you haven't already, please join our LinkedIn page to stay in touch. Just search for the Agile Within and please spread the word with your friends and colleagues Until next time. This has been your host, Mark Metz.