In an innovative software company that is 30 people strong, and where digital excellence is our focus, we use a number of cutting-edge tools to make sure that we are working as effectively and efficiently as possible. That’s why we have decided to start a series where we share our top tool picks. As a company we believe that it’s not only beneficial to learn from each other but also to share our learnings across a wider audience. Without further ado, we would like to introduce our first three colleagues and their favourite tools.  

Question: What is a must-have tool that you use daily (or weekly) for work that you just couldn’t get by without?  

Andi (CTO): IntelliJ, NewRelic, AWS, GIT 

NewRelic provides insights into our running production applications so that we can find bugs or performance problems. It has proven to be an invaluable tool, not only for monitoring our live system but it has even helped us detect and fix potential issues before they become urgent or impact our customers. Apropos production applications: AWS is our tool of choice for running everything in a secure, reliable and scalable manner.  

Before we can deploy and run anything, of course we need to develop it first. For that IntelliJ is the best IDE on the market in my opinion. Whether the project is in Java, Javascript, Typescript or Ruby (or a combination!), IntelliJ is fast and its code completion and navigation functionality is on point. It makes working with large codebases faster and much less error-prone. 

Last but not least I want to mention the developers’ best friend: GIT! If you have ever written a non-trivial amount of code, this needs no further explanation. ;-) 

Linus (Head of Project Planning): Browser, Forecast, Harvest, Slack, JIRA 

First on my list is whichever browser I have open because it’s the gateway to the Internet and it lets me use all of the following tools.... need I say more? 😊 

Being in charge of multiple departments and projects means that the saying “plans are worthless, but planning is everything” is especially true. Using Forecast makes resource and budget planning flexible, fast, and easy while maintaining the importance of forecasting. Planning for future projects is crucial – especially in current times when plans can change rapidly overnight. Harvest lets us easily track the time that we worked on projects and also efficiently invoice our customers. In short, it helps us to: 

• bill the right customer for the correct amount 
• analyse our KPIs for our product development 
• keep track of our project budgets 
• create invoices, generate time reports and other reporting 

Time is money after all! 

Following one of the maxims from the Agile Manifesto, communication over documentation, I feel that Slack prioritises the first while still allowing for the latter. Our team, along with so many others, has had to restructure work habits and communication during 2020. Slack has helped to make the transition from office to working from home as seamless as possible.  

Being able to effectively and easily prioritise tasks and projects, or essentially the visualisation of work, means that Jira is one of the favourite tools here at Tickaroo (and not just for Project Managers). It’s the perfect tool to answer the age-old questions of who is working on what?  

Victoria (Marketing Manager): Jira and Microsoft One Drive  

Two tools (because choosing just one is too difficult) that I use on a daily basis are Jira and Microsoft. Since content creation is a big part of my job description, One Drive is at the top of my Microsoft products list. I really like being able to write something and have it saved online, especially if it has to be shared with others in my team. Seeing changes and being able to discuss them in realtime, even when working remotely, has proved to be particularly helpful over the last few months.  

Jira, which is traditionally used by developers, has long been a favourite at Tickaroo and now the marketing team uses it too. Even though we aren’t the target group for Jira, it was much easier to start using than some other tools that I had tried out and there’s also always somebody to ask if something is unclear. Although we use a next-gen project, the ticketing system and the roadmap are both incredibly useful when it comes to planning and also making sure that everybody has enough work, but not too much at once. Since a number of our projects, especially digital campaigns, also require people from outside of our team, it really helps to organise things so that release dates can be met.