Pandemic and Digitalization — First Two Weeks in State of Emergency

March 12, 2020. The government declared a state of emergency. Within 48 hours, 100% of our team had to transition to working from home. Thanks to investments from the end of 2019, we were better prepared than most — but it still wasn’t without problems.

Day Zero — Friday, March 13¶

On Friday morning, we convened a crisis team. The decision was made quickly: from Monday, we work completely remote. The IT team spent the weekend preparing — we scaled VPN from 20 to 150 concurrent connections, verified cloud services, and prepared guides.

WireGuard, deployed at the end of 2019, scaled without issues. On Monday morning, 87 people were connected simultaneously and the VPN didn’t even falter. Latency of 3-5 ms compared to 15-20 ms with the old OpenVPN was indispensable.

What Worked¶

Slack became our virtual office. We introduced channels for projects, text standups, and optional “huddle hours” for a sense of presence. The migration to Slack completed in January proved to be crucial.

Productivity? After the first two weeks: number of commits increased by 15%, code review turnaround shortened from 6 to 4 hours. People worked more focused without office noise.

What Didn’t Work¶

Printing and scanning. Processes requiring physical signatures blocked work. Onboarding — a new developer started during the first week of lockdown. Courier with laptop, four-hour Zoom, Miro board. It worked, but not ideally.

VDI performance. Servers weren’t dimensioned for 40 concurrent sessions. Urgent RAM purchase — delivery took a week, the longest in history.

Slack Messages Tripled¶

People compensated for the absence of personal contact by writing. Things that a short conversation at the desk resolved now took a 15-minute message exchange. We had to learn asynchronous communication — not everything needs an immediate response.

Three Key Lessons¶

• Invest in infrastructure before the crisis
• Digitalize all processes — not “when there’s time,” but now
• Communication must be intentional and structured

We Survived — and Learned¶

The state of emergency revealed every weakness in processes. But it showed that we’re capable of adapting faster than we expected. The digital transformation we had talked about for years happened in two weeks.