Some basic tools for telecommuting or teleworking, a brief survival guide for P.O in containment working with Agile Scrum method

Hello bloggy my old friend! I have come to talk with you again…
I just released 3 books on Amazon and several videos tutorials about it. That was the occasion to create also a new entrance in this Blog’s menu named “Publications” Ohhhh. So, I was pretty busy. Anyway, when I decided to create my page on Amazon, I saw that I neglected my blog for 8 months, what a shame!

Meanwhile, the Cov-19 (Corona) steps in, so I am “trapped” like anyone, experimenting “TT” aka “Télétravail” abbreviation for telecommuting or telework in French.
What a good kick, to “cook” for this blog-coming-back-post a short P.O survival guide in containment! There thousands and thousands of tools, so here is a not so exhaustive selection of tools available on the web. Hope you find it useful.

A warm thanks to Tim, our Scrum Master. The guy deserve my deepest respect both for the cigarettes I have borrowed him, for his philosophic background that enables us to talk, after our daily, about Bergson or Alain and for sure for his “relentless” benevolence! He is the one who provided most of the tools quoted in the list. Thanks dude 🙂

But here is the tools’ list: short P.O survival guide in containment.

A tools shortlist guide for P.O survival in containment

Some very useful tools for anyone telecommuting due to containment.

For a conf

• Whereby: very intuitive, very user-friendly, I have even curated it to my son’s teacher to organize Classroom. A very basic and robust tool for Online conf call management and coworking tool.
  https://whereby.com
• Zoom.us: impressive tool for Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing. Free for 2 users, Free but limited to 40 minutes if you are 3 in the meeting. I am thinking of using instead of Skype for instance.
  https://zoom.us/
• Join.me: for your Meeting & Rituals, this tool is dedicated to Screen Sharing, Online Meetings, Web Conferencing. Quite OK.
  https://www.join.me/

For a agile rituals

• Funretro: online retro scrum tool, not bad but retro may not fun at all! 🙂
  https://funretro.io
• VotingPoker.com: a good way to organise your Planning Poker. It is very intuitive for Agile Poker Planning Tool.
  http://www.votingpoker.com/
• Remoteretro: another tool to play agile by the book. Never try. Thus, their baseline “A real-time application for conducting Agile retrospectives” is promising.
  https://remoteretro.org/
• Metroretro.io: Another tool to play agile by the book for the retro: creating virtual post-it, drag and drop, give emotional feedback, the learning curb is steep but when you catch the tool’s essence. You can play along. Still it is pretty sophisticated.
  https://metroretro.io/
• Aggie.io: a tool to explain by drawing / sketching, a picture is worth a thousand. You can draw a picture with people in real-time over the internet in your browser. It is useful like a screencapture tool like Skitch!
  https://aggie.io/

In conclusion

I do not quote Teams, Slack, Skype, Trello, Github, Youtube, Skitch… that are already an integral part of the P.O.P (P.O.Panoply) like the cape or the red nod* is to Superman.

For sure the list is far from being exhaustive I guess there will be hungry entrepreneurs that will try to grab a piece of this enormous and existing market since the situation is here to stay.

Take care and stay at home.

* apparently the real name given to the red underwear that Clark Kent is wearing on both side on his daily superhero works! Clark Kent: “Mummy, where did you put my red panty?” Clark Kent’s Mum, distant voice from Kitchen “…is at the dryer, sweetie, I need to clean it once in a while!” Extract from “Private life with a superhero, embed with Superman”.