The last thing any of us ever expected as we at Bellrock Technology closed a financial round in the Autumn of 2019 or as we scaled our development and Sales & marketing teams through January & February was a global pandemic that would leave our offices shuttered and our team spread across the Central Belt of Scotland.
Personally I’d seen first-hand, on my many travels to the region, how the Asian countries handled the SARS epidemic back in the early 2000s, and I’d naively assumed this was another SARS – technically it is but this pandemic proves that it’s tricky to use past experience as a guide! My assumption was that the Chinese and other nations of the region would contain the virus as they had done before.
But here we are at the end of Week 11 of Bellrock staff working from home, and Week 10 of a UK national lock down that has put all of us into unprecedented times
Firstly, I’m really glad we took the decision to move to remote home working before the lockdown was imposed, we we barely saw any change to the company as a result; we were already using Zoom and other conferencing tools, we had already taken monitors and essential equipment to our homes and the company’s structures and interactions helped the team adjust rapidly.
The Silver Lining
The point of this blog, however, is not so much to extol how we prepared for this, though it’s important and congratulations are due the whole team for that.
The real aspect that has impressed me the most about the Bellrock team has been the fact that the development process of our Lumen platform has barely skipped a beat; deadlines have been hit, or exceeded, new capabilities prototyped and added to the platform and the progress to the next chapter of the product (and the company) is well on track.
The new normal
We’ve seen a lot of negative comment in tech & start-up surveys published on the COVID-19 crisis, we’ve seen some pretty negative leading questions in some of those surveys too, but I do wonder if we in the tech sector have fully grasped the new opportunities – not by capitalising on the misery of the sufferers of the disease itself – but in the forcing of a “new normal” on our companies, our teams and ourselves as individuals?
We at Bellrock have seen the positive aspects in terms of our development cycles, and the wider world will see the results of that in the latest iteration of our platform in June. We do miss the office banter but with tools like Zoom, Slack and others, we’re keeping the camaraderie that is so important while delivering in shorter, more compressed bursts than we’ve seen before
The benefits we have seen:
- Development cycles
- What the new normal brings
- Coming out the other end stronger
- Real flexibility
COVID-19 has put us all through “interesting times”, distilling the Bellrock team spirit into something stronger, more powerful than before and when we do come out of this we will have learned a lot about ourselves and our co-workers. Silver linings anyone?