Having a well-oiled remote team is essential for my company – we work across different time-zones and countries, meaning that we can’t always meet and talk at the same time. To make sure that my team runs smoothly and efficiently, I rely on several different tools to help me manage and coordinate remote teams.
One of the most important tools I use is an online task management platform like Asana or (in our case) Jira. I’ll be honest, I don’t love Jira, but I haven’t found anything else yet for the development team to use that covers all of what we need. We plan and run our sprints through it, with some add-ons like Miro for retrospectives and Confluence for documentation, apart from the usual things like creating/assigning tasks, set due dates, track progress, get notifications when tasks are completed, and collaborate with team members in real-time.
We also make use of (video) communication platforms like Teams (what we use) or Zoom/Skype for Business to actually run meetings. We occasionally record and share video calls and store them in Jira for future usage. As before, we use Jira features such as whiteboarding and apps like Miro, which can help us to come up with creative solutions to challenges.
Teams is the main chat tool, which allows us to create channels for different teams or projects so that everyone can easily communicate with one another. It also has convenient features like direct messaging, file sharing, and integration with other popular tools.
Finally, while I use Dropbox for smaller non-work projects, for team collaboration we use Confluence (as above) and OneDrive (others exist, such as Google Drive or Dropbox) to store documents and share them with my remote teams. I think this is an area that could be improved as Confluence is more about collaboration and less about storing docs, but I feel OneDrive is the opposite. We do both and I feel like there should be an app that could do both.
Overall, these tools are essential for us in managing and coordinating remote teams. They help keep everyone organized and connected, while also providing the necessary features needed to complete tasks on time and effectively collaborate.