Imagine your perfect morning: you wake up taking your time, go to the kitchen to have your first coffee, and smile, thinking that you don’t have to push strollers through the subways or get stuck in traffic jams.
COVID 19 decided everything for all – including your team and its having to work from home. Just like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Amazon, and other world brands that recommend their employees to work remotely.
But this is easier said than done! The teams working in big corporations with powerful CRM software and project management tools probably won’t see any difference. And what if you have around ten people in the team? How do you ensure that hard-line office workers are able to do their work from home?
To do this, you’ll have to use magic outside of Hogwarts, or you can lean on ready-to-go solutions to run a remote team. Luckily, everything you need is already invented. Atlassian offers sophisticated solutions for project management, perfectly suitable for remote teams.
Pros & cons of running a remote team
Distance work is not so bad, and now many employers and project leads have an excellent opportunity to test the sustainability of their teams working from home. Well, you won’t be able to have an urgent live meetup at your office or look over someone’s shoulder while working, but hey, you’ll get things done.
What other challenges might you face?
- Staff productivity decreasing
- Lack of communication between people working on one project
- Difficulties in arranging an effective working process for everyone
There are more good points though:
- You’re at home
- You’ll be able to find out the true working potential of your employees. Give them a chance to think creatively without limits and see how long does it take them to finish the tasks
- Cut down costs on your office services. Maybe you’ll find out that you don’t need it at all
- Everyone will be in a great mood because they won’t be spending time to get to work, time that can be used constructively for the business
How Atlassian enhances the good points, smooths the bad ones, and stays in tune with every team
Google Docs, Excel, Zoom, Skype, online planners, and digital kanban-boards are a good starter pack for organizing the work. Still, it’s insufficient to strictly plan tasks, establish smooth communication between co-workers, and see their progress.
Jira Software, Confluence, Bitbucket, and other Atlassian tools effectively transform the weak points of remote work into strengths.
Why Atlassian?
1.Don’t let the productivity fall
Challenge: at home, even the most hardworking people relax with insufficient control and vague motivation.
Solution: Atlassian gives you external motivation. For example, when you have a new ticket with a task, you’ll get an automatic notification on your email. You can leave comments, attach files, assign your co-workers to the ticket, and mark its current status. That way, you let your team understand that they work together, and all of them are responsible for making the work a success.
2. Watching the team’s progress
Challenge: lack of communication between team members who work on one project. They’re not sitting in one room anymore and can only discuss some routine questions online. It’s challenging to have everyone at the meetup at the same time, and classic reports and calls with everyone take time. The question is how to bring different pieces of work together?
Solution: Jira makes all that happen for you. As employees and team leads move through the project, they mark their progress in Jira. The system collects this data, unites it, and analyzes the progress of the whole team. You lean not on the words from the experts, but on the objective evidence.
3. Single source of truth
Challenge: it’s hard to establish an effective working process for everyone. The staff may not have access to the FTP server, CRM, or specialists from other teams to ask advice.
Solution: it’s essential to keep the project and all information about it in one place that everyone has access to. Confluence is a wiki-platform ideal for this way of working. You get all the relevant information in 2 clicks and don’t have to wait for an expert to answer.
4.Fast feedback for team members and clients
Challenge: it’s not always possible to connect someone right at the moment, and people miss small talks with colleagues.
Solution: Atlassian tools give the opportunity to leave comments to the tickets, attach files, and discuss something without turning to messengers. It’s also possible to get feedback from your clients, sharing with them the relevant pages from the Knowledge Base.
What we pay attention to when using Atlassian tools to run a remote team
When the clients ask us to organize an effective remote team, we focus on the fact that people are always more important than processes.
Choosing a tool and setting it up requires mostly technical expertise, and there are some particular rules and algorithms, which simplify the work. That’s why the real challenge for us is onboarding and working with the team.
Onboarding means guiding people through the new software and its customization for everyone. In a word, it means involving people in the work process. Onboarding is vital at every step of a company’s growth, as it lets every team member get the maximum benefit from the software.
We want to know that when completing the onboarding process, there are no misunderstandings or concerns in your team. That’s why we pay attention to defining the roles of all of your team members.
Any business has its particularities, and Atlassian tools are highly customizable to meet all your requirements. Workflow customization, improvement of basic functionalities with the help of apps and plugins, integration with the other tools. All this will make your life much easier at a time when you probably need it the most.
The quarantine won’t last forever and the pandemic will end soon, but you’ll get the effective management methods forever. Get in touch with Polontech experts, and we’ll find the most suitable solution for you.
