I wouldn't have thought about this topic before, but I submitted this session when being in Ukraine, in October 2022, during the eighth month of wartime. I am a Ukrainian IT Project Manager who would like to talk to the world about a superpower that we learned during 2022. A year when your company becomes strong, facing unique, unpredictable challenges. A year of heroic team members. When flexible and careful project management keeps stability and protects projects from chaos. A year of mega support from your clients. A year when IT projects have been successfully delivered no matter what. A year of wartime remote work.

In my session, I'll cover the following:
- Morning of Feb 24, 2022, and our first weeks of wartime.
- Company challenges, support, and lessons we learned:
Keeping constant contact with the team.
Relocation assistance, financial and psychological support for employees.
Flexible & careful project management
- Real stories about developers who became volunteers and defenders but continued doing their work.
- Practicalities of remote work during wartime.
- Pillars that helped Ukrainian teams to support their mental health.

I will also share real-life examples of how many-sided and still successful remote work could be during a force majeure.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this session, attendees will be able to develop a force majeure policy in their company based on real examples from the Ukrainian teams. We wish no one in the world to face what we faced in 2022, but we would like to show that running your projects in the most challenging time is still possible. We will share our experiences and tell what we did to support our teams and businesses. You will be able to apply our recommendations to an emergency plan.

Prerequisites

Attendees will get the most out of this session by being familiar with the situation around Ukraine in 2022. Knowledge of any specific details is not required. General knowledge of the situation will be helpful in order to understand the context of the session.

Synopsis

The world is massively changing today. For Ukrainian teams, the world changed dramatically on Feb 24, 2022. This session will be about wartime remote work and the superpower Ukrainian people and the IT community learned by overcoming the challenges they faced while continuing to deliver success to projects they were working on.