The COVID-19 pandemic and the mass shift to remote working that followed are having a huge impact on how IT development projects run, on their methodology and on their effectiveness. Previously established management methods no longer work. We have spent a lot of time on this question, and have summarised our views below as a starting point for discussion.
1. Project operations and team dynamics: the distributed, non-traditional model takes over
Impact:
Project teams that previously often worked together in a shared office suddenly switched to fully distributed, remote working.
Consequences:
- Communication processes transformed: spontaneous, informal conversations were replaced by structured online meetings (Zoom, MS Teams, Google Meet).
- The need for transparency: in a remote environment, documenting project status, tasks and responsibilities (e.g. in Jira, Confluence, Notion) became essential, as there were fewer opportunities for verbal alignment.
- Time management and asynchronous work: as flexible working hours spread, asynchronous collaboration became more important, requiring new routines (e.g. a morning Slack check-in, written status reports).
2. Agile methods gain ground
Impact:
In our view, remote working further accelerated the wider adoption of the agile mindset, and made much more precise planning and measurability a necessity.
Consequences:
- Planning, planning, planning: breaking down, tracking and documenting tasks precisely became extra important.
- Daily stand-ups, sprint planning and retrospectives need to become more structured online - with time limits and tickets prepared in advance.
- The role of project managers and Scrum Masters grows, as key figures in maintaining cohesion in remote teams.
- Remote working made metric-based project tracking especially important. Progress has to be visible, and you need to see exactly how much work each team member can complete in a sprint. (The differences can be huge.)
3. Changes in technology and tooling
Impact:
The technical foundations of remote development had to be rethought - especially in terms of security, availability and developer experience.
Consequences:
- The rise of cloud-based development environments (e.g. GitHub, AWS Cloud9, JetBrains Space), enabling constant VPN connections to the corporate network.
- The role of DevOps and CI/CD tools (e.g. GitLab, Azure DevOps, CircleCI) needs to grow further, as manual release processes must be replaced by automated, remote pipelines. Developers no longer sit side by side working out the next step.
- The importance of code review with online tools - which also takes code quality to a new level technically.
4. Project and stakeholder management
Impact:
In our view this is where the most significant change is needed. Leaders and PMs must introduce new methods to keep projects under control without micromanaging teams.
Consequences:
- Introducing asynchronous status reporting (e.g. an automated weekly status on Slack) - fewer meetings, yet up-to-date information.
- A visual project roadmap and deliverables
- Tasks must be broken down into elementary units and documented precisely (user stories and their breakdown) - only then can progress be tracked. These should be administered very precisely, for example in Jira.
- Maintaining company culture is a huge challenge - how do you keep a team a team?
5. Lessons learned and the future trends we expect
Positive lessons:
- Remote working has proved that performance doesn't depend on presence - it can be measured in results.
- Decentralisation encourages better documentation, process-level transparency and collaborative decision-making. It also brings different developer skills to the fore (precise planning, good tracking and so on).
- The shift towards hybrid working makes it easier to integrate global, cross-border teams - which will also bring cost synergies.
Critical points:
- Business requirements also have to be defined much more precisely, using templates - which calls for new skills.
- Mentoring junior colleagues and supporting their development has become harder without in-person contact (and AI is reducing demand for juniors, so they are not in an easy position).
- Onboarding - especially in complex development environments - can be extremely difficult.
- The risk of burnout has increased - everyone is at home, alone.
It is already clear that COVID and remote working didn't just bring a temporary state of affairs - they set off a profound transformation in how IT development projects run. Organisations that adapt flexibly gain a long-term competitive advantage - they become more agile, more digitally prepared and better planned. Developers and business analysts must change too. Hybrid working is now the new norm, and processes, tools and culture all have to be shaped around it.
What's your view?
The FrontX team
