Hello, guys! Before you start managing your company and projects with Riter, we would like to talk about organizing work in teams. Our software allows you to stay aware of everything happening at work, manage tasks and track their progress, gives your team space to collaborate. But with all its capabilities, Riter can not tell you what tasks you need to implement and how to assign them to developers in the best way. After all, no matter which advanced tools and methodologies you are using, some things you still have to decide on your own. At some point, if the team is not properly organized, you can face a problem of tasks absence or lack for some developers. This applies mainly to remote employees and freelancers. You can decide that this is not your problem, but in our opinion, this is an incorrect approach that will not only harm the team, but your projects as well.

In the modern world of IT development shifting responsibility for work outage is an amusing but widespread phenomenon. It is directly related to the predominance of remote work and collaboration with freelancers in this sphere. In the office world, there is no such problem. When a developer has no tasks, he can do anything and he will still be paid for this, as he is staying at his workplace. Freelancers do not have such a privilege. For some reasons, it is believed that the lack of tasks for a freelancer (or a remote employee) is the problem of the freelancer himself. As expected, a decision which is chosen by freelancers is quite logical and obvious - they take several projects and constantly switch between them. This is one of the reasons why freelance work of is considered to be harder than work in an office.

But everything should be conversely, and it is quite possible to achieve this! Set your own tasks independently. Tell yourself: "I have nothing to do anyway, so I am going to perform this useful task. I can only be stopped by another task". The ability to set yourselves adequate goals, their accurate preliminary description and detailed final report distinguishes a professional developer. At the same time, it is important not only to fulfill a certain task qualitatively, but also to justify its necessity. Obviously, tasks like "I'll rewrite this module here, because its code is awful" should not appear at all. But the formulation "I remember, the customer has long asked for this feature, and now it is just the right time to do it" is extremely successful. An additional benefit of such behavior will be a demonstration to your project manager of how the tasks posed to you should look like.

The effect of these actions may be different. In the first case, the manager will understand that if you do not have work, you start doing something wrong, and give you enough tasks. Otherwise, he will see that even without additional control you do everything right. Here we can also use an allegory of the cement production. If the blast furnace, where the marl is fired, is stopped, it will starts cooling down. When it cools down, the bricks will decrease slightly and begin to pour. Stopping a blast furnace is a much more expensive operation than keeping the temperature in a blast furnace even without raw materials and production so that the temperature is staying high enough. Therefore, it is necessary to hold fire constantly and the lack of raw materials is certainly not the problem of the furnace.

Do you agree with this statement? We will be happy to hear your opinion on this subject. Each team tries to find the most suitable method of work for them, and we do not pretend to be the only true approach. We hope your developers will always have tasks which they will pay full attention. Good luck in all your endeavors!

Riter development team