How to Map Work From Home Efficiency of Developers to IT Clients

Work From Home – The only solution to keep the economy running in the crisis of COVID-19. It is very scary to go to office and work. It is risky to have in-person group meetings. And the scariest moment is while sitting at home and doing nothing, you get a thought about the upcoming recession. While majority of the industries have stopped working, there is one industry which is still functioning as usual – IT Industry.

Due to lockdown in all the infected countries, all the IT professionals of those countries are working from home. Working from home comes with the perk of Saving time for commute, it comes with more problems as well. It is hard to convince the majority of the people that work from home can be as efficient as possible. The main challenge comes when a client is paying for developers for the number of hours they have spent. In the crisis time, when everyone is forced to do work from home, it is advisable to have few processes in order to avoid the conflicts.

1. Daily Update Meetings(or Scrum)

Conduct atleast one daily meeting for allocation of the work and taking the update. In order to get the maximum confidence, It can be divided in two meetings. One quick meeting in the morning for allocation of tasks and second in the evening, one hour before the closing hours to have the demonstration of the completed work. But having two meetings can eat up lot of time. It can be combined in one meeting only – where the demo comes following with the discussion of the next step and can skip the other scrum meeting.

2. Time Tracking Software

The most concerning thing for work from home is: No body is there to monitor you and ask you to work diligently. Well! If you are the one who also think this, then let me tell you – This was the concern few years ago – not now. We do have the technologies to help you in monitoring. One of the best tool for the same is: Desktime. Showing the example of how a working day should look like:

When client sees the proper graph with the details, he will not have any other option apart from trusting the developers.

3. Manage Effective Communications

Developers should be responsible to make sure that they understand their task and they complete their work within the defined time. However, this is not the case every time. Sometimes it happens that developers get stuck at some points and it takes way more time than what is required . This is very hard situation to explain to the clients.

We should maintain efficient communication channels, where developers can share their issues quickly and can get the solutions quickly. Also in case, if there would be delay in the day-end output, that is communicated to the client much before the time. Because mentioning the delay at the end of the day would be a sin!

There are other things as well which can be taken care by the managers– which is daily work log emails and checking in with the developers on random basis to find their availability, showing to client the report of output on the regular office work vs work from home (This will only work when there is no/very less deviation).

Still, not got the proper solution? Then the only thing you can consider is: The world will be normal soon. This is just for the crisis time. When the tough time will be passed, there will be days when you will be back to office and can respond to your client just like you were doing few days back!

Stay home, Stay Safe and enjoy work from home!