We have been working remotely for over a year now, 15 months in fact, since the office was last manned, apart from picking up snail mail.
At the time, the absence was voluntarily driven by circumstance, and covid was insignificant, a month away from morphing into a life-changing event.
March 2020 arrived, and we realised that we were not going back for a while and only then updated our blog to reflect that on March 17th.
Web development Projects in Hand
We have been fortunate because we have been busy designing and developing websites and online solutions for existing clients, and new projects have come our way.
When office-based, working in a team daily, managing project workflow, random requests from clients, planned maintenance, and handling new project enquiries, it all hangs together to a certain extent utilising custom-designed excel worksheets and a plethora of other tools.
Still, we were always looking for a shiny new program that would do it all for us so that we could get on with the day-to-day web design and development business.
Out of the office, it's a different story.......and nobody brings cake or doughnuts.
Web Development Communications:
Trying to communicate as effectively as before has been a challenge that we have met.
Zoom took over from face-to-face client meetings and, to a certain extent, in project development with the team.
Loom has been really good for highlighting walkthroughs and system features to clients.
Whatsapp has always been handy and remains so at a local level, and I personally could not be without it at a social level.
Still, new systems have been adopted to manage more effectively, with the implementation of the Asana project management app after reviewing several well-established products on the market.
All of these apps are great in their own right, but even a trial means you have to invest time and effort, and once you are sure you want to trial it, then you and all users have to stop using systems that have become second nature to make the trial effective.
Most of these solutions have a lot of features that are not always apparent at the outset. Between them all, there is a trade-off, and you have to prioritise what is most relevant to your operation.
Seamless Web Development Project Management
The key objectives were to ensure that all data, updates, and resources were in one place and that access to content was permission-based, i.e., it may not apply to all users now, but will be next week and that access can be managed by literally associating the staff ID to the project, or to a task within the project.
Project Status and Dependencies
In addition, we needed the current status of all projects and all contributors to achieve the various project milestones.
More than that, we needed to have people working on a specific task within the project to communicate specifically on that task without needlessly involving everyone else with round-robin emails.
We now have contributors' dependencies identified to ensure that everyone is aware, at which point their role becomes pivotal in progressing the timeline, a bit like passing the baton in a relay race except that it is linked to everyone's calendars.
Asana sends automated internal notifications of the change of task status from "waiting" to "in progress" to "complete," which are invaluable as now 9 to 5 is replaced by flexible working and daily updates on scheduled tasks as they mature.
Daily project task notifications as they mature