How we work

I often have conversations with business owners or managers about internal systems and collaboration tools. MyEcommerce is turning seven soon and we've tried numerous collaboration tools but seem to have settled on a few to keep things simple and focused.

Our business is Google based which means our email runs through Gmail. Hangouts is integrated into Gmail so using Hangouts is a pretty natural thing for us as everyone has Gmail open all day.

Our work revolves around the production of code or refinement thereof, so we make use of GitHub and Bitbucket to manage our centralised task lists as well as source version control. This way developers only need to check one location for tasks assigned to them and don't end up getting emails for each task or request.

We make use of Dropbox for file sharing. Our team is distributed so having synchronised file sharing is really important. We also share folders with clients to make it easier to handle file sharing on projects.

Instead of filling in an attendance register, we use Harvest for time tracking. Time is logged for all activities and it's really interesting to see how much time is spent on what might often be considered simple tasks. It's really important to get insight into how time is being spent as it allows us to plan for days off and mitigate risk on future projects by adjusting our cost estimates to take historical performance into consideration.

There are a few use cases we haven't found existing tools for just yet so we might just launch a side project to scratch our own itch.