Alain Fontaine’s Jabberbox

A couple of days ago, after a tough day, I had a small discussion with one of my developers at work. I asked him to show me some document on his PC, and it took an awful long time for him to open it up because he mapped a network share on his private laptop he brought to work, and his laptop somehow stopped responding. My reaction was to say that this was an unacceptable loss of time and that I would think about no longer allowing people to bring their own gear to work.

Whilst I was driving home, I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that this was an emotional decision and that it felt wrong. Now that I took some time to think it over, I am sure that this is not what I will do in the future, but rather the opposite! I will encourage people to bring their own stuff to work, and even more than that…

(continue reading…)

In one of my previous posts, I wrote about some key points to make an office move successful. Today I’d like to speak about the importance of adequate office space.

First of all, there is probably no one-fits-all rule for office space. Depending on your business and activity, and on many other factors like will you be receiving customers or not, your ideal office space definition might be different from mine.

(continue reading…)

This weekend, atHome Group moved to new offices in Luxembourg. Moving a whole company in less than two days takes a good planning and preparation to minimize “downtime” of the systems and especially the team. You don’t want 30 people be unable to work for several hours (or days) because something went wrong or you didn’t think of something important. As I was given the mission to handle this project, here are a couple of do’s and don’ts that I feel are important.

(continue reading…)