Adapting to COVID 19 reality

The COVID 19 pandemic is creating havoc all around the world. We have be relatively lucky in the Bangladesh, there hasn’t yet been a major spike in cases. But as with all other places it is very likely to increase, we are all worried.

It’s proven over and over that “social distancing” the right approach for stopping the spread of the virus. An excellent read with very visual proof of this is a recent article in the Washington Post: how to flatten the curve.

At Kaz we started working from home from today. This is the first time the whole office went into working from home mode so it is a new experience for us. We’ve been working hard to make the transition absolutely smooth. Here’s how we are doing it.

Support in setting up home work environment

Our tech support and facilities team has been busy last few days helping developers setup work quality environment at home. This includes making sure the PC at home is fast enough (if not we are supplying them with their PC at work to home), the internet connection is good, VPN setup works, etc. Being a software company most of our people have a great computer at home, that helps, but it is not always setup for professional development work. So that means we have to ensure that it’s virus free, has the right IDEs and other tools setup, etc.

Work environment is also the physical environment at home. The place you work should be in quiet part with as little distraction as possible. The chair and the table should be appropriate for the working hours. Our facilities department has been helping our staff with setting up such an environment at home.

On call tech support

We’ve assumed that right at the beginning we’ll have a whole bunch of tech support issues. So our tech support team will actually be at the office for a whole week supporting people. The support procedure we are following is we try to solve the issues online or over phone first. If that fails we would send one member of the tech support to the staff’s house to help out on site. We plan to continue this for the whole of next week and then the tech support team will also work from home.

Guardian for IT infrastructure

We have one tech support person who lives next to the office (this is by design, we’ve always ensured that a tech support person can at the office within minutes 24/7) so that means our servers and other IT infrastructure has a guardian while we are away.

Keeping the office space accessible

The office space itself will be accessible at all times during this work from home mode. This is possible as we have administrative staff living next to the office. We will have one member of the management and facilities working at the office next week to support any unforeseen issues during this transition. Beyond this the office space will still be accessible by our staff by calling our administrative hotline and arranging for an administrative personnel onsite to open the doors. This is essential, as there are likely to be situations where a developer might have to access her desk for something.

Recurring status check

We are introducing a regular status check on a team level. The goal of the status check is to make sure on a daily basis that everyone in the team has access to the resources they need. The check also works a health check on the working environment and the communications of the team.

Skype groups for teams, leads and all

We are using Skype as our main form of communications. This is because Skype was the common communications tools across the teams and it’s great for quick conversations and screen share. Every team has setup its its own group but the company also has setup groups to coordinate with the team leads, administrative staff etc.

That’s about it, I’ll update as we continue this mode and come across issues and solutions we use for those issues. Let us hope and pray that this great calamity that we are going through all over the world will be over soon and we will be back to normal. What a party we’ll be throwing to celebrate that!!

By en:Siouxsie Wiles, en:Toby Morris (cartoonist) - https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/14-03-2020/after-flatten-the-curve-we-must-now-stop-the-spread-heres-what-that-means/, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=88017093