Surprise at the AMPs Awards
How hard could it be to connect 3 sites in three-way conversation with >800 spectators who are spread over more than 200 locations? That’s what I asked myself when the innocent question came from someone in the business who had realised that I could figure out a thing or two about how to use MS Teams and the web of technologies that could surround it.
The TLDR version (15 min read)
I got to architect how we might connect >800 people, remote and in-person to the biggest event of the Synergy events calendar to make it more inclusive. At the event, I got an awesome surprise when I was announced as the winner of the 2020 Annual award for Innovation!
This 5 minute summary gives a simple recipe to upgrading your live events to encourage online inclusion.
It was one of those moments that could go a couple of different directions. On one hand, I could have easily said ‘No, that’s not my job, call IT’. In this case, I chose the path that embraced uncertainty and ambiguity where the solution was unknown to all but where it could be great fun to figure it out together. It turned out that this gung-ho approach to uncertainty with sensible de-risking, would be the attitude that would lead me to architecting tech enablers for the Synergy Annual AMPs Awards and then being asked to accept the 2020 award for Innovation, an award that I had coveted since starting at Synergy.
So how did the story go and what can you do to help your business make any meeting, no matter how large, accessible for your new-found remote workforce? Let’s see how!
This story only really forms 3 parts: Listening, iterating on design and learning. That being said, that was more of a continuous cycle than a linear process that we followed until a team of 10 were comfortable to go live with our big event.
What people where?
As with any engagement, scoping is key. The challenge was thus, 3 months prior to the event:
“With new COVID restrictions, we can’t just put all of our nominees for the annual awards in the one room and then call out the winners anymore. How might we make this a celebration of achievement at Synergy without everyone being in the same place?”
I saw this as an opportunity to be even more inclusive than previous celebrations in a world characterised by social distancing and mass isolation.
A colleague of mine was watching from home and took this snap of her laptop just after I was awarded the 2020 Annual Amps award for Innovation.
“Let’s say for a moment that you could connect everyone somehow for a moment. What people would be where?” By suspending our disbelief for a moment, we could imagine the possible then work back from there. “Well, we can’t have anyone from outside the power-plant visit site and we can’t fit more than 60 people in our biggest meeting spaces.” I explored further to understand the event organiser’s vision for what good looked like and we ended up starting with high level prototype solutions to better understand constraints and scope:
Why not put everyone on an MS Teams meeting? We expect more than 250 attendees and want more control over attendees regarding background noise.
What about an MS Teams ‘Live event’ which can deal with up to 10,000 attendees and allow curation over which video stream is seen by everyone? Sounds interesting!
How would it work if we wanted to present awards at multiple sites? We could distinguish between ‘presenters’ (who see/hear each other and respond in real-time) and ‘spectators’ (who only see/hear but do not respond). It’s easy to have a smooth scripted conversation between a small number of ‘presenters’.
Would we have enough internet bandwidth if all of our employees dialed in to the online event? Well perhaps we need to ensure we don’t have too many people downloading the video stream at once if they are all constrained by the same internet connection. For example, rather than 300 people tuning in to the video feed at their desks in the Perth office, why not draw them in to ‘spectator hubs’ in larger meeting rooms to build community and atmosphere while reducing the load on the buildings limited bandwidth.
This conversation allowed the organiser to start thinking about what people to put where and which executive member would be at which site in which building to enable any awards to be presented anywhere without having to worry about whether they would be seen or heard.
This was the early map I drew out to familiarise stakeholders with the idea.
Constructively challenging assumptions
After this conversation about concept at a high level, it was time to de-risk the prototype by designing and testing. The first foray in to the IT support space was unfortunately met by “our current infrastructure does not allow for this”. I understood the response in terms of not having ever done anything like this within the business but I knew that we had enough experience with the constituent components to know there was grounds for a constructive challenge. In the pursuit of a ‘crisp Zoom call’ while working remotely during COVID, I’d learned about how professional ‘YouTubers’ and game streamers captured high quality live video streams on a budget. There was an enabling building block that I could add here that could unlock the whole scenario.
A screenshot from the tutorial I shared that cracked open a conversation about using a $30 accessory used by YouTube gamers to do what a $200,000 commercial AV system couldn’t do - connect an external camera to MS Teams.
Sometimes, you just have to see something to believe it. It wasn’t long before this ‘computer says no’ moment that I’d brought something called an ‘HDMI-USB capture card’ in to the office to test a way to connect a video camera to MS Teams to boost the quality of the audio and video from the typical webcam setup. To dispel disbelief, it was just a matter of sharing the recent learning that with one $30 dollar accessory, used by professional Twitch game streamers to capture their gameplay, we could turn existing camera equipment in the business in to a powerful platform for sharing. By using quick, mobile recorded video clips showing the component of technology (a high quality camera being turned in to an MS Teams webcam) working, it instantly broke up the perception that our mission was impossible and opened the way for further testing.
This casual share of a video tutorial was a little tounge-in-cheek and perhaps the difference in my approach when it comes to drawing out challenges more proactively. It lead to a meeting with the relevant IT experts in the business where I came to understand why such categorical language had been used to deny support to employees that wanted to change the way we communicate in a COVID world. It turns out that many operational IT support services carry a lot of risk when it comes to doing something new. There simply wasn’t any good incentive to adapt and broaden their services to include video broadcasting of key events. In fact, they were really incentivised not to explore new ground and to minimise having to support new services.
I had found my root cause and it was time to build a new bridge. “What if I could de-risk this high-profile event for you and make it a proof of concept without you being on the hook for it? What if I could help your team learn a new skill without costly training or investment?” Needless to say, they were interested and I could then count on them not to obstruct further exploration.
Testing and learning
I learned most of my technical videography skills last year when challenging myself to record music videos for The Giovanni Consort of which I am currently the Treasurer. An open approach to learning presents all sorts of opportunities to build and apply transferable skills.
Soon after this encounter, an opportunity arose to stream an event that would typically see 100 employees congregate on the ground floor of the Perth office. In COVID time, we could only put 30 people in the room and most viewers were at home so the question became: “How might we make this event accessible to the whole organisation?” This was an incremental proof-of-concept opportunity and I intended to seize it. I won’t lie, this is the bit where my physics degree brain kicked in, allowing me to connect a camera to and HDMI capture card to a laptop and then to deal with the fact that the first 5 configurations didn’t work at all. Trying different components allowed me to isolate problems, learn what didn’t work with what and then get to the 6th iteration which did work. I trained up a member of the IT team quickly before the event then headed off to another meeting that I needed to prioritise.
The feedback from online attendees of the event was good and by reviewing the recording, I was able to tell the next biggest risks as we scaled up. I now had learnings that proved the live-event foundation but needed to adapt for the concept to work when adding two more sites to the mix. It was time to design and engage more broadly.
Ramping up to scale sustainably
One theme was consistent through my engagement with the event team and our End User Computing team: There are enough complexities in this system that we will need to iteratively test until we are satisfied with the result. This meant that we would not assume our theorised event setup would work until we had tried it. 3 weeks out from the scheduled event, we held our first dry-run. To support this and a team intent to replicate events like this in the future, I built a web-page with tutorial videos and instructions along the way with the map of the current equipment concept. This was how I collected my thoughts while thinking through possible solutions and was key to retaining learning and bringing everyone along on the journey with a self-serve learning resource.
This is a screenshot of the event case-study page with tutorial links to minimise dependence on myself to scale this approach to the organisation.
This little gem, the Rode Wireless Go wireless lapel microphone set added much versatility to the audio setup at all 3 presenter sites.
The test run flagged how challenging it was to troubleshoot remotely. Without widespread, basic familiarity of settings within MS Teams like screen sharing, muting or changing from speakers to headphones with the audio settings pane, it took quite a lot of time to get our remote sites connected and up and running. One of the key enablers we had chosen to address an expectation to have a lot of background noise at both sites was to use a wireless lapel microphone setup so that the prize presenter would not have to hold a microphone, could move around and still be heard clearly online. Quite often, the laptop operators on site would use their integrated laptop microphone by mistake rather than the external microphone. I was typically the one who would suggest they try talking while 5m from the laptop then play back the recording to prove that the laptop in-built microphone would not be sufficient for the event. One of the other learnings from this was that the laptop speakers would not sound when the Rode Wireless Go microphones were connected to the laptop, making it necessary for site representatives to really have their sound devices set up as instructed with confidence. It would seem that each laptop had a slightly different response, making it hard to troubleshoot between sites. On the final event day, it was great to see that despite my suspicion that one device was not configured properly, I could trust that both remote sites had it under control based on what they had learned from previous tests.
On the day
After a little technical check with the remote sites an hour before the event, we went live on MS Teams and our two producers saw the 266 home attendees stream in. I was listening to the live stream on my phone with a headset (with a 30 second delay) while watching the event in-person and could breath a sigh of relief when the final smooth transition was made between each site then back to the main office. All went quite smoothly at the end of the day and it seemed that the distributed event team of 2 producers, one camera operator and 2 remote site techs (and backups) had all risen to the challenge of doing something they had never attempted before one month prior. The organisers could sit back and feel content with themselves as we passed the peak moment of complexity in the event, taking a moment to realise that they had done something they previously thought was impossible.
The ground floor in the office with two sites on the projector screens and the main camera trained on the presenter.
I got this happy snap with CIO Gary Peel and CFO Jonathan Cowper as we were packing up the event. They’ve been great supporters of my approach.
The surprise
A couple of minutes after I took the photo above and the crosses to site had gone flawlessly, one of the event organisers leant over and gestured to take my phone. I thought that it might be because she thought I should disconnect from the remote stream and take in the moment in real life but then, as I started tuning in to the citation (I had been on a 30 second delay, listening to the stream), I started to hear the presenter talking about things I had done like supporting workers transition in to remote working by organising a series of short problem solving workshops or by building an innovative and transparent prioritisation approach within our new operating model. The presenter was reading out the citation for the 2020 Annual Amps award for Innovation and I was the winner! This was a fantastic surprise and a welcome one. It’s not always easy to agitate leaders and constantly challenge peers on our way of working and approaches to problem solving. I’ve heard so many award citations reward long term commitment to one particular project or piece of work that I was so pleased that my approach across many smaller pieces of work had been noticed and the ripples had permeated enough of the organisation to be honored with one of the annual awards. This was a real Synergy bucket list moment for me and I continue to be very appreciative of all of the colleagues I’ve worked with who have leaned in to the change that I’ve nudged them towards and helped in creating a movement.
Learning
This experience was all about probing at the edge of technical and perceived boundaries, breaking things in low risk environments then building confidence in a new normal approach to achieve an outcome that was previously thought to be impossible. It was an example of how we created an environment of learning and resilience together to build our capability as a business and make all events more accessible for our increasingly remote workforce. The more technical things I take away from this engagement are as follows:
Enable self-feedback cycles for more autonomous troubleshooting on-site - If someone on site can’t hear what they sound like from the other side of the call, it’s hard for them to adjust and learn how best to configure their MS Teams setup when it’s hard to tell whether the laptop in-built microphone was active vs the wireless microphone.
Microphone inputs and laptop sound card drivers are finicky - Use a USB sound-card to split out the microphone input to provide consistency between sites. In cases where there is a good place to put a microphone without too much background noise, a bluetooth speakerphone like the Jabra Speak 510 would also be a suitable alternative.
Don’t assume slides are needed - The experience is different for those online. We actually disposed of PowerPoint slides that put the names of the winners on the big screens and projectors because the consensus was that it was more important to see the people involved in the event. While it would have been possible to swap between slides and camera views for online viewers, we chose to keep it simple to enable more people to be able to do the job.
It takes a family to raise a child - While I could have acted as an event producer or camera operator, we cycled through many people during practice runs instead, learning from my simple video tutorials so that we could be more resilient in the face of sickness or unexpected events. This approach of distributed up-skilling rather than specialisation was particularly helpful when we had some unexpected events on-site that meant we lost one of our presenter hub operators. With more disciples of this proof of concept, we now have a family of people who are saying that we can be more accessible to remote workers if we really want to be. The challenge now is to enable those people to more autonomously use new equipment to connect their events to remote workers.
Commercial Audio Visual systems haven’t been keeping up - Many businesses have invested in proprietary and commercial communications systems that are designed to work well in one very specific circumstance. My experience since COVID is that it’s worth investing in more flexible, modular devices that can be combined in different ways to deliver the preferred outcome on the basis of any software platform, be it Zoom, MS Teams, or a YouTube live stream. Commercial solutions like MS Teams Rooms (MTR) setups work well but are very expensive compared to an equivalent consumer laptop and speakerphone. This event was an example where the room-based ‘town hall’ audio visual system (which initially costed >$200k to set up over 4 months) could not do what a laptop and external microphone could for less than 1% of the cost. Technology is changing faster than our investment and implementation cycles so flexibility rules.
How might we keep remote workers in mind during other office-bound events? At this event, I learned that we have the tools for even the most complex situations and can now open up any event. We are now thinking more about accessibility for remoters. We took 34 remote viewers in to our quarterly Amps ceremony in Kings Park and one of the remote award winners gave a short acceptance speech that was really appriciated by those in the park. These interactions start with saying ‘why not?’ and I’m glad to lead our practice of getting more comfortable with our new normal of remote working by asking that question.
A week later, we broadcasted our quarterly performance awards at a BBQ lunch event at Kings Park to 34 remote and office-bound workers who were unable to attend.
For the enthusiasts, the most challenging setup was the main event space where we had a more elaborate setup to build in more backup options as we learned how to put on the event more reliably. Here is the equipment layout.
Now, however fun I find this problem solving stuff, sustainability is important and Thomas wants to move on to other pursuits so how could we embed this capability to broadcast large events in to the business, including the Communications teams, change managers and IT Teams? That is my current side-gig and challenge and I look forward to sharing some of the resources I build with you going forward.
We kept the remote site setup a little simpler. I would consider using a bluetooth speakerphone like the Jabra 510 going forward in scenarios with less background noise.
