Last updated on the 28th March 2020.
The situation
According to the COVID 19 outbreak situation in Thailand, and to minimize the risk of spreading the virus to our team, the Outsourcify team have decided to work from home for a while.
The 33 people that used to work in our new office on Thonglor are now each working on their own, but the team stays united through modern communication tools.
Before working remotely, we have verified that everyone is comfortable with the idea and agrees to work at home (have good chair, desk and good internet connection) and we provided the needed equipment to our team. At teh same time we set up a workflow process to have the best communication as possible internally and with our clients.
Of course we are very lucky that our business is entirely aimed at servicing the web already and many of ours clients are abroad, so we have been using online communication tools for years. IT guys anyway are usually better suited to stay in front of a computer all day at home that most.
Internal Communication
Teamwork
Teamwork is a Project Management Tool, found at teamwork.com, that allows to create projects and task lists, and then to track time on each task. All current projects at Outsourcify are on the Teamwork platform, we even have projects to handle general project management. In each project we have all the tasks assigned to our analysts, designers and developers, and deadlines for each. Every team member daily updates his status to indicate what he is working on. This way everyone can monitor who is working on what and be the most efficient.
Google Drive
We use google drive for all the documents exchanges between team members, we have organized every file to be easy to find and edit online.
Lark
After years using Glip/RingCentral as a chat tool, we now use the Lark Application to communicate on every project and on any subject. Lark is pretty much a Slack clone, but its interface is nicer in my opinion, and it’s free. We create specific groups for each project with the concerned people in the team team to have the best transparency and communication on each project.
External communication with clients
Skype, Zoom, Hangouts, BlueJeans
Whatever you’re using, we can use it!
Slack
We use Slack to keep contact with some of our clients that ask for it. We actually have as much as 5 teams on Slack at any moment. Usual stuff, a messaging platform to request/respond and keep stakeholders updated on every project in real time.
Emails
Email is of course a must have, but never managed to really be an ideal solution, most boxes become messes, other tools for chat and project management hopefully come to the rescue. I recommend to keep as little emails as possible, archive everything that needs to be.
Google Calendar
A few meetings per day, even more than before as we do meetings for things that would have been done in real interactions in the office. With so many meetings, some kind of organisation is needed. A calendar.
We wish you to stay safe in this moment, let’s stay at home and use these circumstances to do our best to concentrate on things that matter.
