Blog post

Since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak as a pandemic more and more companies are asking employees to work from home.  I’m happy to say that our company has been operating 100% remote for many years, as we have helped our clients transition their teams to a distributed work structure. 

We get many questions about how we make it work and wanted to share some of the practices that we have implemented and are incorporating into our daily work routine.

1. Provide remote team with the best suite of tools to be productive.  These tools focus on software development, team communication and collaboration, knowledge management and project controls.
2. Develop an outcome-based process with clearly defined and agreed to expectations of deliverables, timelines and quality of work, without the need for continuous monitoring of employees.  
3. Implement a continuous discipline for estimation of work, evaluation of deliverables and daily online team check-ins and updates.
4. Incorporate security measures to protect systems and data
5. Acommodate flexible work schedules, with the exception of mandatory core meetings attendance. 
6. Organize teams by feature/product based verticals to streamline remote collaboration of smaller and more targeted groups.
7. On the technology side, use system architecture that support microservices and microsites for fully custom systems or PaaS (Platform as a Service) for Cloud based SaaS (Software as a Service).
8. Utilize proper System Architecture to support quick and independent product/feature team releases to decrease feature to market times.
9. Manage expectations and continuously improve business process by doing regular retrospectives. Don’t expect everything to work perfectly on day 1. There’s definitely a ramp-up period.  Learn from your mistakes, improve your practices on a continuous basis, customizing the process based on composition of the team and needs of the business.

As we meet new challenges, taking advantage of available tools and skillsets allows us to help our clients to continue to grow and succeed.

What are some of your tips to make transition to remote work a success? What are your biggest challenges?