December 2020

Has This Year Changed Technology?

Focus on Productivity

IT professionals across the board are now faced with the ultimate challenge. How to help their businesses maintain productivity and engagement in a workforce that has been forced away from a central work office location.

Some of the new technology challenges include:

How to secure remote access to the corporate technology infrastructure and information (e.g., VPN, SSL VPN, DirectAccess)
How to deliver and maintain a reliable infrastructure at employees’ remote work locations (e.g., Internet access, computers)
How to increase collaboration (e.g., Slack, Trello, Jira, Confluence)
How to drive accountability and improve project management to make sure things get done (e.g., Asana, CommandHound)
How to deploy people tools to manage recognition, rewards, culture, and engagement (e.g., Preciate, Kudos)

In this edition of the MangoChango Newsletter, we explore the world of challenges facing IT professionals in this new distributed and highly collaborative environment that is here to stay.

Here is our monthly curated list of thought-provoking books, blogs, and videos about managing and supporting distributed teams and work environments:

Here Are the Companies Leading the Work-From-Home Revolution

By FORBES – Jack Kelly

It seems that the widespread availability and ease of use of technologies to collaborate and stay in constant contact, such as Zoom, Slack, Google Hangouts and other services, enabled people to smoothly adapt to the new work-from-home setup.

What does this mean for IT professionals as they move to seamlessly support this new work environment?

How Technology Is Changing the World During COVID-19

By Deloitte Digital

Every industry is being challenged to quickly adapt to this new world. And leading that charge, from online ordering systems to video chatting, is technology.

But technology can’t do it alone. In order to truly pivot to a more digital organization, companies must have an agile backbone of organization, people, and systems that can easily shift gears, adapt to new technology, and take on what’s yet to come.

Successful Remote Teams Communicate in Bursts

By Christoph Riedl and Anita Williams Woolley

For remote teams, effective communication is both a challenge and a priority.

We are now also learning that remote communication is most effective when teams coordinate to communicate in rapid-fire bursts, followed by periods of uninterrupted “deep work time.”

MangoChango has been operating in a remote and distributed manner since its inception. Now, we find ourselves leveraging this expertise and lessons learned for our clients’ benefits.

MangoChango’s engineers are experts in a wide variety of technologies, frameworks, tools, and languages, with an emphasis on continuous learning as new thinking, tools, and techniques come to market.

Check here for more information and to explore our technology assessment and maturity framework.