Our working environment
Our working environment is as flexible as you need it to be, I don’t care how we complete our work, only that we do, and we do it well. You don’t need to tell me:
- if you’ve got to pop out for an hour,
- if you want to go away.
Simply put the dates in the team calendar.
Before you go away, ask yourself question: Given what i’ve committed to delivering, is now is the right time to go? If it is, go ahead. You deserve it!
If you want to travel and work, i positively encourage it. Over the past year. I’ve worked from Amsterdam, Italy, Switzerland and Gran Canaria, other members of the team have worked from France and America.
To enable this flexible working arrangement, we need to trust each other, and be visible. Therefor we use the following tools to support that.
Basecamp
Is the place where we discuss the projects we’re working on and tasks we’re doing. It’s also the dumping ground for links to project assets etc.
- Friday pm or Monday am – we should update the ‘overviews’ to-do list with a project status.
- Task creation – All new task should be added to the backlog, when creating the task and overview of what’s being achieve should be added, and any other relevant details.
- Working on a task – The task will be moved from backlog, to in progress. All discussion about the task will happen in the task comments.
- Task completion complete task should be moved from in progress to done.
- adhoc meeting should be summarised in a discussion.
- general discussions should be created as a discussion.
Invision
If you need to collaborate on design Upload your sketches/screenshots/wireframes/designs here. Share your project with our stakeholders and collect feedback. **Make sure you password protect your share link. I regularly remove any unsecured share links.
Slack
Everyone should be logged in to Slack between 11am – 3pm, there is a client for Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android and an app extension for the PC.
There’s several discussion groups which is where we can chew the fat, keep the fun going or ask general questions about our projects/tasks.
Use your status to let people know if you’re free or don’t want to be disturbed, people may not reply straight away, and we should be considerate about everyone else’s time.
If you need to video chat someone or a group of people then type /hangouts and it will create a google hangout that you can use for video chatting and collaboration.
Matthew Goddard 
Thanks for sharing.
I’m surprised you use Basecamp, over Trello or Jira. Is it primarily for the benefit of your clients? Basecamp has never seemed agile enough for lean ux.
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Hey Ross – I like the flexibility that basecamp offers and that you can co-ordinate discussion around tasks (in to-do lists). So I set up multiple to-do and just move the task and discussions to the appropriate lists. (I can then infer any KPIS from the size of the lists, and the datetime stamp of the changes).
Trello doesn’t offer the same level of integration into people emails systems that Basecamp does, and i don’t really like Jira (although i imagine it’s improved since the version i used) as it doesn’t seem as seamless to post task and comment on them.
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Thanks Matt – really helpful.
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