I found taking time to get things in order up front pays dividends later. Meet with the team to figure out the answer to these questions.

1. What communication mediums best fit the team and overall company culture?

2. I think this is highly dependent on you, the manager, and the viability of the project.

3. What meetings does the team think they should start off with? No matter the answer, have a recurring meeting every couple weeks to assess and adjust any assumptions you make in these early meetings. Maybe you find you’re meeting too often, or not enough… or people are confused by where documentation goes, or whatever is causing friction. Make time to talk about it and come up with things to try to smooth it out.

4. Pick a place for documentation, which I assume will be somewhat dictated by the existing company culture or available tools… but have a spot with a basic structure, so it doesn’t become a question every time someone needs to document something. Templates may also help, depending on what it is.

5. You could agree that certain days are to be free from meetings, to ensure everyone has some heads down time, or create blocks where meetings go to avoid them taking the whole day. I also found it helpful to have a dedicated meeting for the team to get together to ask random questions, share things they learn, etc. When people know there is a place to do this, for things that’s aren’t super time sensitive (that would take more time than the stand up), they are less likely to fill random other times throughout the week or derail other meetings. Of course, if something is time sensitive and someone is stuck on something, that should revert back to #1 so someone can help them get unsuck. Something like Slack works for that, and team members can meet up as needed for that stuff.

6. Make sure everyone understands the goal of what you’re trying to do and why. Make sure they have context of the world around them, so they aren’t making decisions in the dark, or at least know enough to know when to ask the larger group. One thing I found really helpful at the start of a big project was to get everyone in a room to map out where we are today (not the ideal of what it should but the reality… assuming you are starting from 0), then map out what you’re looking to build. You can then draw the map(s) on how to get from point A to point B. Having everyone involved makes sure people see all the parts, so they have context, even if they aren’t working on all those parts. It also helps to get misunderstandings out into the open and cleared up, so everyone is on the same page. Some people moaned and complained about this when we did it, but after a while they got into it, and I found it extremely helpful to make sure we were all heading in the same direction. This is also a good time for everyone to get to know each other, and their background/skills, if they don’t already know each other.

This is how we ran things about 6 years ago in my team. It started off a bit slow getting all ducks in a row, but we quickly sailed past everyone else, because things were running so smooth. It was great. For a while I had to explain to my boss we were laying some foundation and he seemed a bit impatient by the lack or tangible deliverables. But fast forward a little and he was saying we were so far ahead of everyone I could go to Europe and chill for 3 months if I wanted.

Fast forward to now, with some major leadership changes and that old team broken up. Planning is done by a few people behind closed doors, documented haphazardly, where people are expected to spend their time hunting for docs they didn’t know where written to inform their work. The plans are always 30% done, and the people making them are a huge bottleneck, as they are a single point of failure and no one knows what to do without asking, as any decision made is deemed wrong, either due to lack of context, or ego. This isn’t what you want. It’s a mess… 3 years in and it’s still a mess like day 1. Make sure your team knows what they’re making, feels like they are part of the process, and can make some decisions along the way, within reason. If you try and do it all, it’ll be too much.