Development in CloseIT in the Coronavirus Age
Warning: This blog post doesn't contain any advice about how to newly cooperate with your team.
Since the end of 2019, the whole world is affected by a new type of coronavirus (COVID-19). There is a lot of restrictions forbidding people spending time outside, visiting restaurants, traveling to work or just work.
Almost out of nowhere, we can see TOP 10/5/3 advice on how to cooperate within your team remotely, every other manager now praises his team on how they handle this difficult situation, people and companies are sharing their pictures from the home office...
Well, for us, nothing really changes. In CloseIT we are used to working remotely, we are used to solving problems not only onsite with the team but also with clients remotely. So we assured them that nothing is changing on regular deliverables.
Whether we are in the office, at home, in the coffee house or at the airport terminal /hi Thomas :-) /, we still use Slack for quick communication and when the situation requires it, we use Google Meet. For Scrum as our project management methodology, there is Jira, a fantastic tool by Atlassian. So as a scrum master, I have a continuous and regular overview of how a sprint is evolving (btw, right now we are in the middle of sprint 70). And any issues I can't see on our online scrum board are reported by my colleagues during regular status meetings every single day at 10:30.
Just as we managed the status meetings, there was no problem with our planning and estimation meetings which take place every second Monday. I'm also sure there will be no problem with our business review meeting planned for next Friday.
So no, there is virtually no change to our normal cooperation and development process. Or, actually, maybe three small ones:
- We miss the best of the best colleague "Jura".
- We miss our table football league.
- We (read: "only our scrum master") miss our physical scrum board.
Author: Michal Jilka
