Home Office - Fluch oder Segen? (3/3)

Miljan Vranic

I love working from home. Since beginning of my software developer career when I was working as a freelancer I fell in love with this kind of work. I am the most creative and concentrated when I can make my own office set-up with light, music, snacks, coffee, turned off phones etc..

In order to have this kind of work possible, some prerequisites have to be met. Luckily, in taktwerk all of them are already in place, so I can share my firsthand experience from my daily job.

Company management

The most important thing in proper home office work setup is that company managers are open for this kind of work. Without this, it is almost impossible to make it work. From my first day in taktwerk we agreed that I can do home office two days a week, which is tremendous support for my family tasks, as I am father of a four year old son. Those two days I can organize work hours around my kid's timetable, so I can spend more time with him and that helps a lot in my wife's and mine weekly adaptation to kindergarten working hours.

Goals oriented approach to work

Next prerequisite is expectations management. Unfortunately, there are still a lot of companies in IT industry practicing employee management inherited from old manufacturing industry, where all people are required to be at work from 9 to 5 and the only measure of quality is how many extra hours some employee made. Those that work Saturdays and Sundays are the best.

Fortunately, there are companies with modern approach. In those companies, employees still work hard and work in average 8 hours a day, but everything else is completely different. The most important measure of work quality in this kind of companies is if goals are met. Work tasks are assigned in small (weekly or bi-weekly) bursts and progress could be followed on a daily basis. All that matters is if work is done, and we all know that finished projects are paying our salaries.

Taktwerk implements this approach through careful practicing of Kanban. Tasks are sliced to small pieces of work, goals are made for every week and strong communication culture prevents misunderstandings in task descriptions. Also, very important result from this approach is that project delays are rare and easily predictable.

Tools, tools, tools

In order to make our way of work possible and more fluent, we at taktwerk use different software tools. Very often we experiment with new tools in order to try to improve things we already have in place. Some of the tools that are very important in everyday usage are:

Slack - team communication tool that keeps us always up to date with everything that is going on. This is great replacement for emails that could be really annoying when it comes to the point that more people trying to communicate by CC-ing everyone about everything. We have rooms for projects, private and misc things. Whatever is going on in company at the moment you can find it on Slack wherever you are. This is very important tool for home office.

JIRA - project management tool where all tasks are organized, assigned to employees, scheduled, and tracked during their entire lifetime. In every moment you can tell what some employee is working at the moment by just going into JIRA and looking into appropriate project. Also, you can see what are the project goals for the current weeks and how things are going. This saves a lot of time and prevents unnecessary meetings that tend to eat to many hours just for obtaining information about who is working what right now.

Bitbucket - taktwerk is software company, so we use Bitbucket as a Git repository for tracking all source code changes. This is also important for quality control, because you can see how some developer resolves problems, does he tries to take extra mile and finish his task in an elegant way, or he is just trying to get rid of it.

Confluence - This is our knowledge base where all project documentation is written and regularly updated. In an agile team as Taktwerk there is a lot of work going on and we use a lot of different programming languages, frameworks and tools, so knowledge base is very important for us to keep track of everything. This is also very important enabler of home office, because you don't need to call coworker lately in the evening just to ask him something that is normally kept in knowledge base.

Toggl - Time tracker that measures how much time we are spending on tasks and helps us improve everyday planning.

This was list of the most important tools we use and I want to say that you can always find several alternatives for each of them. This is our set that works at the moment, but maybe in a few months we change some of them if we find something that works better. No matter what tools are used, important conclusion is that tools are important to keep communication in the team smooth and to justify goals oriented approach in a company.

With all described it is easy to say why home office works well in taktwerk. I am convinced that this is approach that makes company different and attractive for employees, which is very important in a very competitive industry as IT. From the other hand, all implemented principles give high quality products and services to our clients, so this is clearly win-win situation.

• Zum ersten Teil, Einführung Home Office
• Zum zweiten Teil, Beitrag von Benjamin Bur