[sdnog] How to work from home

Sun Mar 29 01:11:24 SAST 2020

Dear All,

Greetings,

I would like to thank you for sharing your experiences, I am too excited to
explore all these tools (Jitsi, Jira and Trello), again I would like to
thank Manhal for starting this and SDNOG and all participant in this email.

On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 12:00 AM manhal_muhamed at hotmail.com <
manhal_muhamed at hotmail.com> wrote:

> wow
> i'm so enjoying this discussion , happy that my question lead to that huge
> amount of informative talk :) it really did enlightened me for so many
> tools/process i wasn't aware of
>
> im so excited to test ALL the tools mentioned ,tomorrow from office :D to
> prepare myself to start WFH ^_^
>
> please dont hesitate to share more experience ^_^
>
> -- Manhal
>
> Sent from my Huawei Mobile
>
>
> -------- Original Message --------
> Subject: Re: [sdnog] How to work from home
> From: "Mukom Akong T."
> To: Sudan NOG
> CC:
>
>
>
> Salamualaikum sdNOGers
>
>
> I've been following this discussion and I thought I'd weigh in a share my
> experience.
> Before leading the Capacity Building team at AFRINIC, I was a one-person
> unit reporting to the CEO
> Anyone on my team can wake up any morning and decide they are going to
> work from home
>
> - they just need to send a mail to the team and copy HR
> - they don't need to state any additional justification for working from
> home
> - we've been doing this (even before coronavirus) for as long as I've been
> at AFRINIC
>
> I'm going to borrow from Simon Sinek and start with WHY
>
>
> 1 | Why Does Anyone Need To Work From Home
>
> - the nature of the job makes it so (I had a member of my team who lived
> in another country)
> - need to handle some personal errands at home (care for spouse, sibling,
> child, parent or even be home for the plumber)
> - illness (could be a flu --- no need to call in sick but no need to come
> to the office and spread it, or like now ... CORVID virus)
> - need a change of environment to focus (there's some kind of work for
> which I need to play HD quality music while working, and do things I cannot
> do in a shared office
>
>
>
> 2 | How Will We Know That Working from Home is Working?
>
> For a manager, the concerns include
>
> a) "How do I know that Mukom is actually working and not playing Call of
> Duty all day?"
> b) "Is Mukom's working from home going to disrupt the work of the team or
> company in any way"
>
> For the staff, the concerns include
>
> c) "Will I still be able to maintain my levels of productivity?"
> d) "Will my absence from the office negatively affect me in some way?"
>
> Therefore,
>
> - so long as the work can be proven to have been done
> - so long as customers are getting served well
> - so long as projects are progressing and getting reported
>
> Then it really doesn't matter whether you work from the office or from the
> beach at the Red Sea Resort in Port Sudan. Of course, NOT all jobs can be
> done from home
>
>
>
> 3 | How Do You Work Effectively From Home?
>
>
> One of my personal principles has always been: "Use extreme personal
> accountability to buy yourself freedom".  In other words, if you hold
> yourself to a higher standard of quality and accountability that your
> manager sets for the rest of the team, s/he will quickly realise "Oh, I
> don't have to worry about Manhal, if she says she'll move a pyramid from
> Khartoum to Port Sudan by the end of the month, she'll either do it OR if
> she cannot, she'll let me know ahead of time so I don't get surprised"
>
>
> I'll briefly share the system that we've implemented in the team to make
> working from home work.
>
> a) Planning the work
>
> - anything that we do repeatedly or do at the same time every year is a
> process.
> - **all** processes are documented (in a joint team session) in confluence
> where anyone can see them
> - every process has a process manager (one person on the team whose
> responsibility is to ensure that the customer of the process is happy
> - the steps of the process are then implemented in standard templates on a
> task management tool (we started with Trello, advanced to Asana and finally
> landed on Jira)
> - **every piece of work** that will take more than 1 hour to do, is first
> recorded in our task management tool (Jira) --- usually, each task has a
> Definition of Done (DoD) checklist
> - the team's goals for the year/quarter are also in the tool so each task
> can be aligned to a goal
> - every Monday, the whole team has a weekly planning meeting to plan the
> work for the week. After the meeting, every person on the team knows what
> everyone else is going to be delivering that week
>
>
> b) Doing the Work While Being Available
>
> Every day, whether from home or from a coffee shop in Khartoum,
>
> - every one "Checks in" ie. essentially "Hi team, these are the 1 - 3
> tasks I am focusing on for today.
> - we implemented a simple check-in system in Slack (a channel called
> #checkin where people post their 3 most important tasks for the day. An
> example might be
>
>    2020.03.24 | Xorlali | 3MITS
>    ├ Complete "Environmental Analysis" part of capacity building strategic
> plan
>    ├ Call Nishal and get his feedback on module 2 of routing online course
>    ├ Prepare for meeting with Regulator X about Y
>
> - everyone in the team can see Xorlali's focus for today (just as they all
> know her commitments for the week)
> - since the work is in Jira , open your Kanban board in Jira and start
> working (everyone in the team can see that as well)
>
> It's important that you be available and reachable, especially when
> working from home. For us that means someone should be able to reach you
> and get a response on Slack or Skype or Telegram. Of course, you can set a
> Do Not Disturb for 2 - 3 hours to focus, but do get back to people who left
> you messages. It's little things like that that make WFH work.
>
>
> c) Reporting the Work
>
> Here's where most especially technical people have a big problem.
>
> **Work has no value to the organisation until it has been reported as
> done**
>
> Even if you choose to argue with that, unless you want your manager to be
> pestering you with updates every hour, you want to establish a routine for
> reporting on the status of work that's been done. Here're the mechanisms
> we've implemented over the year
>
> - The #checkin Slack channel above? --- at the end of the day checkout
> (just tick what you did, no explanations). This is a good way for someone
> who works from home to signify they've closed for the day
> - At the end of the week, write a weekly report of what you did that week
> (if you plan your week, check-in and check-out, this should take maximum 30
> minutes). We have a standard template in Confluence
> - During next week's weekly planning meeting, you'll report your
> accomplishments as well as challenges you faced.
>
>
> d) What Tools
>
> The tools are not as important as the process and daily practices. So I'll
> speak about Categories of Tools you need
>
> - Task/Project management tool: Where all the actual work to be done gets
> recorded. E.g Jira, Basecamp, Trello, Asana etc
> - Document/Knowledge management tool: Where long-form reference
> documentation for projects, processes, best practices etc is kept e.g.
> Confluence, Wiki
> - Realtime document collaboration tool: Where multiple people can work on
> the same document simultaneously e.g. Google Docs/Sheet/Slides, Etherpad,
> Ethercalc
> - Realtime communication: for communicating outside of email (think of it
> as a replacement for the Intercom) e.g. Slack, Telegram, Skype etc
>
>
> Ok, that was long. In conclusion, I'd say
>
> Making WFH work is first and foremost a manager's responsibility - before
> it becomes the staff's responsibility (of course there're exceptions ---
> pioneers). It's they that often have to fight with archaic HR practices and
> silly policies designed for the industrial age and lazily forced on
> knowledge workers.
>
> If there is a sufficient number of managers in Sudan interested in
> exploring how to set up their teams so they can work effectively from home,
> I'll be able to organise a webinar or something to assist.
>
>
> On Wed, 25 Mar 2020 at 02:15, sara alamin <sara.alamin90 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> اdocumentation or wiki tools  to write what you have done, or to list
>> your processes :
>>
>> mediawiki, Twiki
>>
>>
>> ticketing system :
>>
>> Request Tracker (RT): open source, very efficient.
>>
>>
>> team collaboration and discussion board:
>>
>>    - Trello, easy to use. has mobile app.
>>    - Slack. I have not used too much, but maybe someone here on the list
>>    may give you more info about it.
>>
>>
>> sharing files, sources, data
>>
>>    - nextcloud, i have worked with it recently; very good tool, and you
>>    can install plugins to add more features like Nextcloud Talk for
>>    audio/video conferencing, collaborate on documents, Nextcloud Groupware
>>    integrates Calendar, Contacts, Mail.
>>    - owncloud
>>    - seafile
>>
>> but i do like nextcloud :-)
>>
>>
>> video conferencing:
>>
>>    - Jitsi :
>>
>> good with poor connection if you are not sharing video or your screen ,
>> no need to install client , just browse to it.
>>
>> *INX-ZA are offering a free meeting tool used jitsi (@edd :), but it will
>> not be really efficient routing. it’s free and open source and i am sure
>> the inx-za people will offer to help. and if Sudan IXP can have like this
>> service will be really good!
>>
>>
>>
>>    - bigbluebutton
>>
>> if you are teaching or you need a board to write, marker and so on.
>>
>>
>> اتمني ان تكون اجابتي مفيدة و بالتوفيق
>>
>> —سارة الامين—
>>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 24, 2020 at 8:15 PM Fahd Batayneh <fahd.batayneh at icann.org>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello Manhal and sdNOG Friends,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I hope you are all doing well, and staying healthy in these hard times.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> For a mailing list such as sdNOG that has many technical folks, I can
>>> see that the answer to this question would have two paths; one for
>>> “Technical” folks and another for “Non-Technical” folks.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Technical folks could either work remotely by accessing servers
>>> remotely, or would have to physically be in a data-center running beneath
>>> cables and cabinets. I’ll leave the answer to this part to our technical
>>> geeks.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> As for non-technical people (like myself), I have been working remotely
>>> from home for the past 6.5 years. While I do have a home office, I do not
>>> use it much. If you are able to manage your time wisely, working from home
>>> is like working from an office. The only key difference is that you do not
>>> have your work colleagues around you to have discussions, and so you would
>>> end up using your phone or VoIP platforms to communicate with them more.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> I do have a good Internet connectivity at home, and so am not in a
>>> position to share an experience with poor connectivity.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Bottom line, if you have work to do, whether at home or at office, it
>>> should not make a difference. Try to adjust.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Thank you,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Fahd
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> *From: *sdnog <sdnog-bounces at sdnog.sd> on behalf of "
>>> manhal_muhamed at hotmail.com" <manhal_muhamed at hotmail.com>
>>> *Date: *Monday, March 23, 2020 at 11:57 PM
>>> *To: *sdnog <sdnog at sdnog.sd>
>>> *Subject: *[Ext] [sdnog] How to work from home
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Hi all
>>>
>>> Hope you are all safe wherever you are,
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Regards to the current situation around the world , and as we all
>>> adviced/forced to start working from home which is not common here in our
>>> community , and I know some bosses are not convinced unless they saw you in
>>> your desk :D
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> my question is , for simple offices ,with no great infrastructure , just
>>> an internet connection to their edge ,how can they work from home ? Is
>>> there any free tools /ways  they can use,  what are the options, with
>>> taking along the security concerns
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> what is your advice to achieve that in a proper way , and for those who
>>> managed to work from home , how did you do that ?
>>>
>>> Please share your experience ^_^
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> And how we as "sdnog community" can help in that "for the old fashioned
>>> bosses :D"
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Cheers & be safe
>>>
>>> -- Manhal Mohammed
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> ⁣
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Sent from my Huawei Mobile
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>>
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>>>
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>>>
>>>
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>
>
> --
>
> Mukom Akong T.
>
> LinkedIn:Mukom <https://www.linkedin.com/in/mukom>  |  twitter:
> @perfexcellent
>
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> “When you work, you are the FLUTE through whose lungs the whispering of
> the hours turns to MUSIC" - Kahlil Gibran
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
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>

-- 

Best regrets

Mohamed Ayman
Information and Network Engineer
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