Author: Paola Malafaia is a Certified Master Anaplanner and Associate Consultant at Cornerstone Performance Management.
Most of my early career was working physically allocated on a client with a specific project goal in mind. Those were the days of whiteboard sessions, impromptu desk conversations, and the constant, ambient hum of a shared physical space. However, over the last few years, this context has completely shifted. Today, I have to deal with multiple clients remotely and often across disparate time zones.
This transformation didn't happen because my position changed drastically ((it did and did not at same time but that might be another blog post). Rather, a confluence of personal decisions and global transitions led me to fully embrace remote work. And while it definitely does have its disadvantages — the lack of spontaneous social bonding, the potential for digital fatigue and other questions widely discussed — it also provides immense benefits. It helps to cover a wider geographical zone, allowing me to connect with clients who might never have been accessible before. At the same time, it optimizes resource allocation, especially when dealing with clients that have varying, sometimes overlapping, focus on multiple simultaneous projects.
Navigating this distributed environment requires not just replicating in-person processes digitally, but fundamentally rethinking how we collaborate. The biggest challenges are often related to transparency and rhythm.
Hot topics on the remote-first approach
- Daily iterations (and interactions): Establishing the rhythm.
It is crucial to establish a team routine daily to review the work completed and to be done. The standard is the daily stand-up: what I did, what I am doing, blockers. But in a remote setting, I find that we need to go beyond the rote update. It’s nice to keep everyone on board of specific features and findings with direct tool navigation and screen-sharing, even if for just five minutes. This keeps the team on the exact same page, not just the conceptual one. Furthermore, these scheduled interaction points are essential to break up the solitude of deep work and inject a little human connection. This ritual defines the daily operational rhythm and ensures tasks don't sit in an ambiguous state for too long.
- Communication: Needs to be proactive and transparent.
Communication is the absolute bedrock of a successful remote project. It needs to be proactive, transparent, and immediate in intent. The biggest time-waster in remote work is the "social-first, intent-later" approach. Instead of the archaic "Hi Paolo! How are you?" and then silence for a few hours while Paolo tries to guess the ask and you wait for the greeting to be acknowledged, the communication must be direct. It is always preferred to send: "Hi Paolo! Hope you're having a good morning. I need some assistance with the following reconciliation process. I'm stuck on step 4. [screenshot/link/context]." This allows the recipient to triage the urgency immediately and start thinking about the solution before they even type a response. It respects everyone's time, especially when time zone differences mean a quick question might otherwise delay a deliverable by a full day.
- Organizing the work into a collaborative tool.
It is extremely important to have a collaborative tool in place (Jira, Asana, Trello, etc.). This isn't just a digital backlog; it's the single source of truth for the project. Every task, every requirement, every conversation about that specific piece of work needs to live there. The tool must enforce process. For example, a task is never simply "Done" but moves through "Review," "QA," and "Client Sign-off." This structure provides the necessary accountability and prevents the loss of context that often happens when status updates are scattered across instant messages and emails.
- Estimate the work: Embracing asynchronous sizing.
Estimation is notoriously difficult in any context, but remote work adds a layer of complexity. The key is to embrace asynchronous estimation. Instead of spending a two-hour virtual meeting haggling over story points, estimates should be provided individually beforehand. The meeting time can then be reserved only for discussing outliers — the tasks where one person estimated one hour and another estimated eight hours. This focuses the conversation on clarifying complexity and requirements, which is the actual value of estimation, rather than simply achieving consensus on a number.
- The challenge of client alignment and visibility.
While the internal team structure is critical, managing client expectations and visibility is an entirely different matter. Remote work can feel like a "black box" to clients who are used to walking by a team in an office. This requires over-communicating progress. Instead of waiting for a weekly update, leverage the collaborative tool (if the client has access) or send brief daily summaries that focus on results achieved, not just time spent. This consistent stream of updates creates trust and confirms that work is constantly moving forward, mitigating the perceived distance of the remote setup.
By prioritizing proactive, context-rich communication and ensuring teams have high visibility into project routine, we transform the challenge of distance into the advantage of distributed efficiency. Ultimately, the best remote projects aren't those that successfully mimic office life, but those that optimize for the asynchronous, documented nature of the digital workspace.
What tips would you add?
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Also by Paola: Using territory maps with Anaplan
