Business and COVID-19
Currently, just about every company has been deeply affected by large-scale changes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Some companies (like IT companies) were more prepared, some were prepared less.
The 4xxi team also faced some difficulties but was able to switch to remote operations so employees can work from home.
We decided to share some of our experience of running remote operations, its pros and cons, the difficulties that we faced and the decisions that helped us to act quickly. Our top management will tell you about this.
Hi, I’m Alexey Syrkovsky, a PM lead in 4xxi, an IT company from St. Petersburg, which develops cool and successful world-class projects. As for today 4xxi has over 40 developers, and the number doesn’t include administrative staff.
Before the pandemic most of the employees worked from our office. We had only a few “remote” employees that worked from home. However, it’s been over a month since we switched to remote operations and it’s going pretty well.
All who were used to the office had to learn how to work from home. So I recommend a book by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried — “Remote: Office Not Required”, available on Basecamp.
So this is what changed:
- we increased security measures, i.e. new monitoring checklists and rules to cover data removal. We are planning to make some of the measures public soon, by the way.
- we reduced the time spent on meetings as it had taken more time to have a personal meeting than it takes to have a call discussion now.
- we are resolving questions via Slack quicker now; employees are more devoted to statuses now, i.e. “lunch time”, and this allows us to increase transparency in the company.
- we’re using video calls more often now, this helps to cope with the lack of live communication; funny dress code related stories haven’t spared us though.
The most crucial thing at the moment is an efficient organization of both your work and team work.
All developers and managers are split into teams in 4xxi, so each team is an independent unit that works on its own projects.
A team’s size and composition are set up optimally. A PM (or several PMs if a team is big) run the show. Then there are developers, a team lead and a QA engineer. Designers, DevOps engineers, a tech writer and data scientists can be included in a team when needed.
This team structure proves to be good in the office and remotely as all team members work cohesively and cover their responsibilities and tasks efficiently both from the office and home.
In 4xxi we developed our workflows, manuals and tools that we used to work on projects such as:
- workflows in a task tracker system (Jira).
- a manual that describes how to structure and store a knowledge base and documentation of a project in Confluence and Gdrive.
- team calendars.
- CI/CD workflows etc.
All of these mean we start projects faster, increase team productivity,reduce failure related risks and reduce onboarding time needed to include new employees to a different team.
PMs run their teams independently so micromanagement by a PM lead or a CEO is minimized.
By the way, in the past six months, we’ve implemented many cool tools that simplify managing and controlling projects for lead management as well as for PMs:
- a centralized system to plan and manage the workload of teams and employees.
- a well- adjusted reporting system based on templates.
- a system that calculates rates of returns that show how efficient projects are.
- templates of checklists in Trello: weekly templates, templates to start new projects and templates to run releases.
- our own ERP system that helps to manage days off, vacations and reviews 360.
It’s worth mentioning that due to the innovation remote work from home became quite manageable and realistic and there’s no drop in work efficiency.
The most important thing is to learn how to switch between home mood and work responsibilities and going to the office is not required to do this.
I believe many employees and companies worldwide are considering to keep working from home after the pandemic is over.
