Improving Collaboration Through Plans Of Attack

Problem

Because my teams were based in different locations, we faced an issue where there was a lack of collaboration and things were done in silos a lot.

Actions taken

I decided to institute a process where we published POAs or Plan of Attacks. I required everyone to use the POA template for everything they did, in order for them to think about a variety of things, such as downstream data changes, security, performance, team dependencies, and buy vs. build options. The template acted as a checklist for people to go through some of the behaviors that previously hadn't been happening in our design and engineering teams. At the same time, we published the POAs on a public channel so everyone had the chance to review them and provide comments. This also gave people from different locations the chance to see what their colleagues were working on.

Lessons learned

This process has helped with team visibility and cross-formation. We still face some issues with engagement with the tool, so we now explicitly ask people to tag three people on their POAs to ensure at least three people review the documents and provide comment.