This week we hosted a webinar on Remote Team Orchestration with Former Head of Operational Resilience at UBS, Mark Heywood, Cutover’s Head of Client Success, Manish Patel, and Cutover CPO, Marcus Wildsmith. They discussed how COVID-19 has drastically changed the way we work, possibly for good, and some best practices for working from home.
It was great to have some discussion around this timely topic, thank you to everyone who attended. If you missed the live webinar, you can still watch it here.
This blog post is a recap of the discussion.
The way we work has drastically changed since the COVID-19 outbreak, creating an unprecedented increase in the number of people working from home all over the world. This is creating a huge range of challenges, from businesses having to quickly get set up for remote working to the added difficulties of collaboration and communication due to teams not being in the same room.
In the session, Mark, Manish, and Marcus pointed out some of the unexpected quirks of fully remote working. For example how the lack of impromptu conversations can have an effect on productivity as it is harder to understand when someone is disturbable, and short discussions taking longer than normal due to the need to schedule and catch up with each other.
According to Marcus, this has led to Cutover pushing out a couple of improvements in the short term to better assist clients in dealing with these challenges as well as longer-term considerations about the way we work. Although Cutover had a relatively easy time making the switch to all remote working, there is a difference between the ability to be remote and having to be remote all the time, which is something to take into consideration.
They also discussed how Cutover’s clients are being impacted by the changes and what Cutover is doing to help them combat this. Although the circumstances around COVID-19 are temporary, there are likely to be long-term effects, as remote working becomes more normalized. For Cutover, Marcus said that we won’t go back to how we were and are thinking about how these changes can have a positive impact in the future. Manish also pointed out that clients would most likely want to get back to a more regular release schedule long before the lockdown ends and Cutover would find a way to help support that.
Keeping teams motivated while working remotely is also a key concern at this time. Organizing ways for teams to stay connected such as virtual coffee meetings and happy hours (complete with themes and dress codes - think ‘hats’ or ‘loud shirts’) are just some of the ways to help keep a sense of community while working separately.
There are also the practical considerations of managing major enterprise changes with whole teams remote, keeping everyone informed and increasing observability while minimizing risk.
Thank you to everyone who attended and contributed to the discussion.
If you weren’t able to attend or would like to watch again, you can download the full recording of the webinar here.