Since the very beginning of MobileSoft we have been open to working from home. Frankly, there weren't even that many alternatives back in 2012 when I was at home in Červený Kostelec and Honza Keller in his dorm room in Pardubice. This arrangement had lasted for about 9 months after which we found a small office in Hradec Králové and began to spend more and more time there.
Gradually, MobileSoft has grown to the current size of almost 20 people and in fact, we’ve never dwelt much on where anyone works from. So far our colleagues have worked from home but also from Ireland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, the United States,Australia or Morocco, and last fall almost all of us packed up and went for a week to Lake Garda in Italy.
Due to the current situation with COVID-19, we had a vote and decided that we would all work from home. While it is a completely new situation, it's actually something that we have trained for quite well during the occasional company trips.
I will describe what tools and processes we will use and thanks to which the productivity of the whole team should not drop. I believe that this information can also be useful for someone who might just be starting to consider implementing remote work now.
We use several tools for internal communication. Perhaps the most important one being Slack, which allows, in addition to the classic messenger, to create channels of conversations and quite effectively take care of all text communication within the company. Another tool is ZOOM, which has transformed our meeting room into a virtual meeting room and which we use for regular calls with clients. In the case of one-off calls or if our meeting room is occupied, we use Hangouts Meet, which we have access to as
part of our GSuite subscription and which generates links automatically for calendar events.
When it comes to scheduling our time, we each have our own personal Google calendar to mark all our appointments and calls. Thanks to being able to access the calendars of all of our colleagues in the MobileSoft group, we can very effectively plan the ideal time for a joint meeting or call.
We use Attlasian Jira to manage work, log time and secure the entire development process. We run most projects in 14-day scrum sprints and all the time worked is logged into individual tasks. The important thing is that we have accurate information at all times about what is being done, who is doing it and how much time we have already spent on it. We let our customers access this data in real time.
In addition to the above, we use Zeplin to pass work between the designer and the programmers, Calendly for blind access to the calendar to select time for meetings with people outside the company, and Todoist Business for tasks not directly related to development. And of course, Git for source codes.
A novelty for us now will be a daily stand-up meeting when we're going to discuss among the individual teams what we did the day before and what we will work on next.
I am sure that thanks to everything we have learned in recent years, full remote work will be a new experience for us and it will teach us to do some things even better.
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