Calling all admins: What changes are you experiencing with wide-scale remote work?

[Brian Keough]

Howdy Community!

While we've seen a growing trend in remote work for years, no one could have anticipated the entirety of their workforce reporting from respective home offices. We probably won't fully understand the impact this will have on businesses for months, however we're interested to understand what changes admins have been noticing, both in their day-to-day activities and in the performance of their instance(s).

That’s why we’d love to hear about your experience during these current circumstances. What's different, went's the same, and what impact you think this might have on the way we work in the future (if any). We’re hoping to start a discussion and gather learnings on what this unique situation means for the way admins approach their work.

We can't wait to hear your experiences - and thank you in advance!

[Brian Keough]

If you're interested, check out our blog about what a remote enterprise could mean for admins, and some of the trends we've noticed so far: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/enterprise/self-managed-remote-work

[Alexander Bondarev]

Nice article, thanks!

[Dave Liao]

As more and more of the workforce go virtual, gaps in process and technology are becoming more obvious to users. Notice how after the pandemic started, Zoom started making way more quality-of-life improvements to their app? 😊

[Alexander Bondarev]

Dave, I agree with you, it is really so!

[Fabienne Gerhard]

Fully agree @Dave Liao

[Fabienne Gerhard]

As a user and admin I would love to join in here:

• As a user it's hard to see the struggle some admins are having keeping their systems running cause there was no idea of scaling the system (by the way it's not their fault - cause it came top down) and users are just interested in usage. Processes are badly defined and trouble is coming all the way. Working remote in some (or many companies) is still new and users are looking for someone to blame which can easily be found at IT department. 
• As an admin for a system I see it the other way round - long time not be seen and now everyone wants to have the perfect running system and processes. Not enough resources in all ways and users blaming for all kind of troubles. 

Don't get me wrong it's not everywhere but in some companies a hard pill to swallow for management! Idea of new work and teams did definitly not everywhere. But the longer it lasts the better it gets. 

[Dave Liao]

Yes! When we were all in the same office, inadequate processes can be worked around by walking up to people and tapping them on the shoulder.

Virtually, organizational dysfunction is way more visible. 😅

[Callum Carlile _Automation Consultants_]

I work for a relatively small Software Consultancy company (around 40 employees) and I was pleasantly surprised how we so quickly needed to adapt to all working from home. In an environment where collaboration is such an important part of the job, I thought it was going to be very tough to make this change so suddenly.

This being said, it must have been a completely different story (I imagine!) for much bigger organisations who have had to make similar changes but on a way larger scale, with so many users working on the same software at the same time.

How does a team of admins even go about this?? Will they pre-emptively upgrade all of their systems as fast as they can to cope with the predicted increase in traffic, or do they simply monitor the situation and take it as it comes, making changes if necessary? This could be risky if everything goes down on day 1... Interested to hear everyone's thoughts :)

[John Funk]

Well, it's a year later. Wondering how well some of the suggestions still line up.