Remote Management

As you have learned from my previous blog post, we have recently set up a new office in London, UK. I was involved in the whole setup process from its very beginning, but after the initial phase, I am back home in the US. Due to the fact that I am the head of web development in Our Company, it is within my responsibilities to oversee all work carried out by the London Office as well. And here comes the question about how to do this effectively while being on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

The first thing that is essential for successful remote management is trust. You simply have to believe that the people in the other office are competent enough and that you do not have to micro-manage their work. I paid special attention to choose the right people during the hiring process, so the trust I was talking about is definitely in place.

Not less important is to establish suitable communication channels. Traditional e-mails are a must, while using Skype for instant messaging and voice chat is a great and cost-free option. But what really did the job in our case was our new intranet based on Kentico Intranet Solution. This is a full-featured intranet solution based on Kentico, the ASP.NET web content management system. It showed its true potential by enabling us to create an internal knowledge base to share our know-how, manage projects by means of its integrated project management features, have dedicated website sections for particular departments, etc. And it is all web-based, so we have a single intranet solution accessible from anywhere used by the both of our offices.