ePLATFORMS

My work and digital tools

I work as a team coach in publicly owned IT company. I have an double role as a supervisor and Scrum Master. My work duties includes coaching a dedicated application team responsible for building and developing content within the customer and patient information system. I support the team by facilitating agile practices, fostering collaboration, and guiding continuous improvement. I help the team navigate challenges, prioritize tasks, and stay aligned with user needs and organizational goals. Promoting team well-being and representing the employer, meaning ensuring compliance with agreed practices and organizational policies are also my responsibility.

I rely on a variety of digital tools to support collaboration, planning, communication, and continuous delivery. As an agile project management tool, I use ServiceNow cloud computing platform to manage backlog, user stories, sprints and track progress using Kanban boards. Collaboration and communication are emphasized in my work and mainly I use Microsoft Teams and Miro for that purposes. To give feedback and facilitate team retrospective events I use Miro, EasyRetro, Microsoft Whiteboard, Canva or Mentimeter. Monitoring team performance and entries are an essential part of being successful in my job. I have Power BI reports to help me with that.

The positive and negative side of social media

I think the best aspects of social media are that it brings the opportunity to share ideas and create connections regardless the location. It has certainly reduced loneliness, helped people to find like-minded company and form communities. On the flip side, the result is an overemphasis on the values and worldview of one’s own “bubble”, which has been made worse by algorithms. Social media applications are developed to temptate us to use them actively. That can lead into sleep problems when scrolling too late at the evening. Social media (especially when the productivity is based on advertisements and the work of influencers) may distort the perception of reality and increase comparison with others, which can lead to negative feelings and dissatisfaction. To minimize the negative sides, various recommendations have been created for reasonable and brain-healthy social media use. For example The Finnish Brain Association provides ten tips, link here.

Reviewing five tools of social media

I chose following five social media tools and describe in more detail how I could utilize them in my daily work:

• Miro

I chose Miro, because I use it very often and want to increase the awareness of this great tool, if it’s not so familiar with all of us. Miro is a collaborative online whiteboard that supports my work in multiple ways. It’s like a virtual brainstorming space for teams. It consists of boards, which have many nice features to apply such as sticky notes, diagrams, images, text boxes and ready-made templates for any kind of purpose or event. As a facilitator, I appreciate its voting possibility, timer and easy presentation mode.

By Miro real-time collaboration and visual support, structured online brainstorming is easy, which helps increase team engagement and clarity. I think Miro is a great creative tool to help facilitate any bigger online or hybrid event. I organize sprint events for my team or other bigger workshops with miscellaneous participants almost weekly. I use an extensive Miro Enterprise Plan purchased by our company that allows me to get a lot out of the tool. It allows me to share boards with my colleagues. Sometimes that is a huge timesaver when I can just copy board made by someone else just with my own minor adjustments.

• Doodle

I think I have tried Doodle on some occasion, or at least I have heard about it. But currently I don’t use it, and our company has not purchased the license. But what Doodle is? It’s a scheduling tool that helps individuals and teams find the best time to meet. My work includes a lot of scheduling meetings for my team or even wider groups so assistance for it saves time. I have used Microsoft Outlook’s Copilot for this. Now I try to find out if Doodle would give something extra. I went to see Doodle’s pricing at its homepage. The free version works with Google Meets and Zoom, so it wouldn’t work for me, a heavy Microsoft Teams user. Doodle would suit if I would work as self-employed without a large internal attendee group and if participants use different calendar systems.

• Youtube

YouTube is a video-sharing platform where users can upload, watch, share and comment on them. Content varies a lot and most of it is free, but behind paid subscription you can access videos offline and add-free. I’ve noticed that I’m not the person who often watches Youtube so I feel that I don’t always remember to use it in a work context. I wanted to recap and write down how I’ve used it for.

I do have some favorite business and public authority channels which I trust to seek out some new trends in the health IT industry, regulation and agile methods.  YouTube contains also handy, short instructional videos on the more specialized use of Excel and PowerPoint. That I need sometimes. This spring our company adapted a new goal-setting framework and YouTube was a nice support besides official training with its quick guides and explainer videos. I could use YouTube videos with my team to enhance my message, for example at HR hours about group dynamics or ways to take care of yourself. Though it’s not always easy to find exact video about my topic, I’ll keep this in mind. For now I’m not interested in (or having extra time) making content by myself, I’m more passive consumer who does give feedback and comments videos.

• Slack

Slack is a messaging platform which aims to effective collaboration. It’s popular in technology companies and startups. I wanted to explore Slack a bit. At this moment, my experience of Slack is based only one community which I haven’t visited in months. Slack is not the standard communication tool which we would use in our publicly owned company. But Slack could help me contact, communicate and share thoughts with other team leaders and agile coaches internationally. Basically, I could learn a lot and gain bigger network. One needs to do a bit of internet search to find Slack groups – you can’t just find them from slack.com. I did a search and found a new group to join. This assignment inspired me to be active again in Slack. Never know what kind of opportunities might emerge.

• Pi

I wanted to choose some tool I have never heard of and Pi fits the criteria. I open the page and after selecting answer “ I’m over 18”, Pi greets me and introduces itself as my personal AI. Okay, let’s see what it has to offer. It asks how I’m doing. I’ll decide to tell about this article and my mission to figure out how I could utilize Pi as my daily work. Pi answers that it is designed to engage in conversations with people. It thinks that I could also use it to learn and find information. After I tell it something about my work, I ask what ideas it would have to help me. Pi suggests it could help me with answering team questions, fact-checking, generating ideas or improving communication. I ask how it differs from ChatGPT. Pi tells it was trained using a different dataset which means they may respond differently to the same questions, Pi focuses on being friendly, empathetic and useful and it has wider accessibility (Pi could be accessed through SMS, Instagram and Messenger). My company handles sensitive data and it’s forbidden to give any specific organizational information for external tools such as artificial intelligence. So, I could use this tool for generic and not identifiable questions like how can I motivate a quiet team during retrospectives? I decided to ask this same question from Pi and ChatGPT. For this question both give me almost identical answers (in a different order) and ChatGPT gives me even more ideas. I’m not sure yet if Pi would be a big competitor for AI’s I use already. Though the layout is cozier and more welcoming!

The elements of successful use of digital applications

Based on my experiments with the tools above, use should be quite easy to learn to call it successful. A well-designed application should quickly show its purpose and value. Overall user experience and usability should be intuitive and visually pleasing. Successful use needs obvilously different ways to access the application, so accessibility should be taken care of. The more the merrier, I think.  

I’ve noticed that I prefer applications that either help with routine, time-consuming tasks or offer inspiration and learning opportunities. In that sense, the success of a digital application also depends on the user’s motivation and attitude.

One main thing of course is reliability, privacy and safety. The application should clearly and transparently state its safety and privacy policies. It is easier to trust a big and well-known company which has enough resources to protect itself from errors, cyber threats and attacks.  The application should provide user support and updates as well.

Self-evaluation

This assignment pleasantly surprised me. I learned new social media tools and got back with old, slightly forgotten ones. There definitely are various ways to help one’s daily work. When I was going through the list of tools, I couldn’t help but think about their overlaps and sometimes very subtle differences.