Hi! This is A Minute Of Overpass. My name
is Eric and I make apps. Now this week I wanna
talk about "Some of the Tools that we use
when working with Remote teams".
Okay, so last week I talked about working
with remote teams and you know the 3
ways that we've done it in the past. So we
either do like on
a project basis with somebody on
like Upwork or oDesk as it used to be
called, or the time you know we're having
like a dedicated team like within
another tech company like you know
or working with like as an outsourcing
arrangement so what we're working with
another team that's already been set up
someplace or the way that I
prefer to do it or we do for like
ongoing stuff which is have like
full-time freelancers as part of the
team. So like I said last week, I much
prefer you know having people who prefer
to work from home, who have a computer,
who have a decent internet connection,
who want to spend more time with their
families or not have to be bogged down
with all the commute and the
office stuff and the office politics and
just prefer you know and
still want to be able to make a living
and get on with things.
So slowly we're
building up this team. At one point we
have like a huge team and it got too much
to manage and you know a lot of this is
learning as we go, but now we've got 4
full-time people. We're looking at taking
on a 5th here very soon, but you know
we have to see whether or not we can
handle that. So and a lot of the things you know
a lot of the difficulties we have
here is with communication, so people
working in different time zones,
making sure that everyone
knows what they're supposed to
be doing, make sure everyone's on the
right track and all that kind of stuff.
So what I thought I'd do this week is
talk about some of the tools that we use
and then some of the like the some of
the things we use in the past and how
things have sort of wonder why we
should choose one tool over another.
So the first one we use here is Slack. So
if you have a look at my screen here,
Slack is something if you're
developing you're probably familiar with
it and it's just like a
chat engine. So it's a bit like Skype but
it doesn't do video, but you know so like
here you can see a conversation I have
with Nica. Let's see over to design. You can set
set up channels so you know we do
do an infographic every Tuesday so you
know here's a conversation that goes
through about
about the design and you know what the
topic is going to be for the next few
weeks and all that kind of stuff.
The big benefit....we used to use Skype in
the beginning, so the big benefit this
has over Skype is that it's
more centralized. Skype is more
peer-to-peer as I understand it, so
like a common scenario I have in the past
or you know I still use Skype when
working with somebody who's not part of
our team because I don't want to set
them all up in Slack and everything
like that.
You know they're just doing like a one-off
job or something, but like somebody
might send me like a file, like
an icon and I'll be like on my phone
you know at lunch and I'll download
it, have a look at it okay that looks
good whatever, and when I go back
to my computer, I will try to download
again, but they've gone offline and it's
no longer available.
So this is something that... this is one of the
big benefits I find with slack and
also it's searchable so. I think slack is
free for limited like if
you search back I think a
certain number of weeks. I do pay every
week so it's worth it to
me to be able to search as far back as I
need to and also to have the all these
conversations just there, so you know if
I send somebody a password or if
I send somebody a screenshot or
something I could go back and look at it,
you know it's a lot easier than
you go find in that conversation.
So Slack is probably our biggest like
the thing I couldn't do without.
So and the next tool we use is
G Suite or Google apps for domains. So you
know it would be very easy to all of us
setup free gmail accounts,
but I just kinda prefer having
everybody having an account. So
everything they do for Overpass is
locked down to our
account. Everybody has an Overpass email
address, so name@overpass.co.uk
so when we do work with
clients, I think it looks a
lot more professional than just like a
gmail thing going out there.
And then it also helps in terms of setting
permissions for different
systems and stuff like that. So like you
know Google apps for domains,
sorry,
G Suite as it's now called, of course
you got like Google docs
and Google sheets. So like here's an example
of Google sheets. So we got a Content
schedule for the next few weeks on the
blog. We're trying to get ahead before
Christmas so that we could still have
content going out at Christmas even
though we're going to take that time off.
So you can see here you know they're
going through updating this. I can update
it too, and then of course you got
Google docs and like here's an
example of an article that was written
by Nica on our team.
I'm able to go through and just
check through it, make any edits
that I need to and if there's something
i'm not sure of just highlight it, place
a comment, she gets notified and she can
make a change. So I mean it's all
very fast and flexible. I know we could
use Office 365 and I know that's getting
better and better, but the last time I
used it I just found it a bit clumsy but
this one is like 3-4 years ago, but
now it's you know
I've been using Google Docs or
Google Suite for years.
And in fact I wouldn't even have Office
you know Office 365, if it weren't for the
fact that client send Word documents and
Excel documents all the time. And of
course we've got Google Drive.
We can use Dropbox and we do use
Dropbox when working with clients. So
clients always have Dropbox and they
prefer to use Dropbox, but because we're
all on the Google domains or
G Suite, since we're all on G Suite it's
easier to do permissioning here, so I just like
set up a shared folder. We have
everything in the same place, sharing the
documents and all that kind of stuff and
everything gets centralized. So when it
comes to like code, we use a source
control like Git which makes
sense, and I know some people will
put like documents and images into
source code control, but I prefer to use
just Google Drive for that way,
so you map a drive, it always
gets uploaded and stuff like that, but so
anyway yeah that's a lot of
help.
Now for Task Management, we used...
we start off using Basecamp,
then we moved to ActiveCollab. We used
Jira. We try to use JIRA for a while but
the learning curve was just so... it was so
big. I mean it's good if you're a
developer and you use it all the time.
You can spend a few days learning it,
but when we bring new people on I
don't really want to spend time learning
Jira and a lot of things just don't make
sense for like day-to-day activity so
we just use Trello. Trello is
like the easiest thing. So I'll give you
an example here. Here's the board we
have for Content. So getting back to
content so here we can go
through and I can add Blog Topics that
I think would make a good blog
topic. Put blog ideas down Special
Reports, Video ideas that kind of stuff,
and somebody could pick it up and move
it over to their column and start
working on it. So we got the
different types of content and they're going
out. We got this.
Maribel and Veronica are 2 writers,
if they take it and start working on it so
that goes into Ongoing Research then
they move it into For Proofreading so
I could go through just have a quick
read of it and then it goes into Publish.
So this is a very you know nothing gets
lost in the mix there because we have
everything on those boards, and again
it's just like a list system but you
probably used Trello before but we know
it's just it's trying to keep like not
only do I want to keep the cost low, I
want to keep the the learning curve low.
I want to get
people moving as fast as possible and
not be such a stickler for
things being done a certain way. I mean
they should be done a certain way, but
that certain way shouldn't take
days to learn. It should take minutes or
hours, and of course I mentioned this
before we use Git. We used to
use Subversion, we've also used
are our own hosted Subversion which I
was terrified of actually having the
server go down and not having the
backups work. So then we move to cloud
hosted. We use a cloud. CloudForge was
the company we used and then when we
moved to Git, we were still with CloudForge
but they kept getting more expensive so
we moved over to Bitbucket, and Bitbucket
has like a very generous free tier and
you know but and if we need to add more
developers we can just you know start
paying a bit more for that.
I just prefer it you know being
able to go and my whole
thing with...I try to have
check-ins as frequently and as possible
especially if it's a new developer that
I don't know that well, I would like to
have check-ins on a daily basis just to
see how things are going and then
just go in here and see a
summary of how all that stuff works. And
then Hubstaff, so this is something that
we just started using about 3 or
4 months ago. You probably heard of
tools like this. So Hubstaff, there's
other ones like Time Doctor and
and stuff like that where it just
basically runs on a computer so when
you say I'm starting work you would go
through, you would select the project
that you're working on and it will start
like a clock. So if I can actually... let me just show
you here, if I go up here I get start
Hubstaff and I can say I wanna work on
Admin. It will start this clock going and
it would just start doing it an Admin
tasks so start doing that, and what it
will do is every 10 minutes
at random intervals that will
take a screenshot of my screen and then
you know so that it goes into this tool
so that you can see what it is.
Now the reason I haven't used this
before it's just because it sounds
really creepy to me. Now one of
the things I hated about working in an
office was the boss walking around
behind you, right? So like you know
somebody walking around and say "What are you
doing over there?" and all that kind of stuff
so because you could be like reading an
article thats related to technology or
whatever it is you're working on, but if
it doesn't look like that you can get
into like into trouble for whatever
reason. So that was it. I was kind of
like really just seemed really creepy
and we started it for a while with
another tool and then we stopped it and
the thing I like about Hubstaff, I don't
know if you see this is that all these
images are grayed out. So I can't
really see, I can see you know generally that
something was worked on but I can't see
like specifics. I can't see
someone emails or pictures of the kids
or anything like that and basically
it's the time that I'm more interested
in, and to be honest with you I hardly
ever look at this. I get a summary
everyday from Hubstaff saying how many
hours were gone to each one and that
helps.
Now you know people have asked why don't
you just pay for the work that you're
done and and not based on time, and it's
a really good question.
It's one that I mean our entire economy
goes if you have a
full-time person it's always based on
time. It's you know and it
just lowers the risk. Some people
prefer to have a full-time job rather
than do a contract-based work
or project-based work which might not be
going on forever. So like if I don't
have any projects to work on,
I still have to pay my workers.
I still have to pay the
freelancers because that's our agreement.
So you know it
lowers the risk for them and it
increases the risk becomes
mine but at the same time so
that sets you know because to be honest
with you I don't mind that much, as long
as they're producing what I think they
should producing at the right rate,
everything goes fine. So that's it
for this week. It is really quick going
through some of these tools. You
probably heard of them
already but you know we've gone through
so many of these different things before
and again if you talk to me a year from now,
we'll probably have different tools that
were using in a different methodologies
but it's always a constant you know
trying to see what works best and keep
things moving smoothly. So
that's it for this week. I hope it's been
helpful. Now if you haven't liked the video
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next week!