Due to the coronavirus all events are currently cancelled and it is advised to work from home as much as possible in the coming weeks. Compared to other countries in Europe, in the Netherlands we mostly work from home. The average for Europe is 5 percent and in the Netherlands 14 percent of the working population regularly works from home. Despite the higher percentage, working from home will also be disappointing and challenging for many people in the Netherlands. How, for example, can you manage your projects from home? How can you collaborate with your colleagues and/or clients from home to successfully complete projects? And what are useful tools for digital consultation and document sharing? This insight provides a number of useful tips and tools on how to get started as productively and efficiently as possible and ensure that your project runs seamlessly, even from home.

1. Communicating with your colleagues and customers
Do you want to know what your colleagues are doing at home and keep each other and the customers informed? Here are some useful tips and tools. Working from home does not mean face-to-face meetings and (coffee) conversations with your colleagues or clients. These conversations are now conducted by phone or laptop. But what do you need to pay extra attention to when communicating digitally?

• First of all, it is important to ensure that you can communicate data safely. After all, digital conversations with colleagues and customers often contain sensitive information.
• Furthermore, it is important that you can exchange information quickly and create a good overview. So make sure you have a direct chat option that can replace the dozens of emails for when you want to start a longer and active conversation.

A number of useful options to ensure good digital communication are, for example, Microsoft Teams and Slack. With both, it is possible to integrate other apps and services such as office 365 and/or Dropbox. In addition, these tools have a chat option where documents and messages can easily be sent privately or to groups. It is also possible to use a "videocall" to meet with your project team. An additional advantage of videocalling is that you see each other! In this way you can also pick up that very important non-verbal communication and the conversation becomes a lot more personal.

2. Planning and execution from home
Current developments concerning the coronavirus and the measures introduced by it may affect current and future project planning calendars. Therefore, it is important to review them and assess how realistic they still are. In doing so, you can ask questions such as: how do the measures affect your projects? Is it possible to realize the current planning, or does something need to be postponed? What exactly can be postponed? If nothing can be postponed, what measures should/can I take? In these questions it is also important to involve your clients and other stakeholders. The changes in planning, prioritization, working method and the next steps must be clearly communicated.
When you no longer can physically sit around a table to plan and discuss, what options do you have? There are a number of useful tools online for efficient and effective planning, collaboration and project management. The points below are important when using a planning tool:

• It is suitable for organizing and coordinating teams and managing projects. Tasks can easily be divided and assigned to team members.
• It is important to easily monitor deadlines, gain insight into the project status and be able to plan ahead.
• The planning tool can easily be used and discussed during meetings.
• For project groups that like to work in an Agile way, it is important that the work that needs to be done can be determined and tracked in a sprint.

A number of handy and widely used alternatives are Microsoft's Planner, Trello (for smaller projects), Asana (for larger projects) and PlanITpoker. The latter tool is specifically designed for Agile project teams to use an online planning poker app to easily estimate and monitor tasks.