I am after ideas to make things run more smoothly and more quickly.
I have been using a combination of MS Teams and online tools like GroupMap and Stormz.
But there are long pauses, and less to and fro, and everything seems to take much longer.
I used to like doing attitude timelines but the online tools I have being using have been card based tools. Are there tools that are more flexible?
Clustering ideas is also a lot more awkward. I can fit a lot less cards on a screen than on a whiteboard. It would be nice to zoom in and out, resize cards, and put them were I want instead of having them on a grid.
Before in face to face meetings, when the meetings went in a new direction, I would turn the page on the flip chart, and start crowdsourcing ideas from the team. But now it is much harder to spin up a new digital board to explore something new.
Before when there was a pause in the conversion I would use eye contact to prompt people to speak, making sure everyone had their say. Now the pauses are a lot longer. When I verbally prompt people everything is sluggish and I feel like I am harassing them.
Before the seating arrangement helped determine who was going to speak next. Now I have to prompt everyone.
Before I could scan the room to get a feel for whether what I was doing was well received, or whether I needed to speedup, slowdown or change direction. Now I have to ask and there are more pauses, then the same person alway says something and I can't tell by looking whether there is someone who with a little prompting might give a different answer. I can't give non-verbal encouragement to offset inhibitory effect of the first persons answer and my verbal encouragement just doesn't seem as effective without the non-verbal component.
I have started to open the digital boards for the retrospective at the start of the sprint so people can jot down their thoughts during the sprint. However I know that only a few people will take advantage of that. I can even name them. I have also used Listy to add a Problem CounterMeasure Board to MS Team.
Does anyone have any thoughts on practices, tools or strategies that might improve things?