Payair

Success depends on communication

Bartosz tells about how the new project was set up. The team brought in a bunch of best practices that came from previous experience. Most of us think of boring meetings when people talk about communication in projects. Yes, meetings are necessary, but they need to be planned carefully, have a clear scope and be well documented. The selected model was to arrange a couple of weekly meetings, including one big session with both Etteplan coders in Poland and Payair involved, in true scrum practice style.

But you can’t rely on meetings alone to ensure communication - they are after all quite clumsy. Everyone must be available at the same time and spend part of the time listening to for them irrelevant stuff. That’s why Bartosz quickly moves on and starts talking about tools. One may think that tools like GitLab and Jira are for recording and documenting, but their role for communication is at least as important. Or as Bartosz puts it, “Having everybody from coder to customer in the same tool gives a huge increase in visibility.”

The tools that keep it all together

That’s how the Payair project was set up. The customer had constant access to tools used by the team. They could track progress almost in real-time. And they could comment or intercept immediately if something was going in the wrong direction.

There’s one tool that the team loved to introduce - Fabric. It’s a system for rapid provisioning of builds, making it possible for anyone to test the latest functionality instantly. Imagine how much more the product owners get out from playing with the real product when it suits them, compared to just watching a demo!

It’s obvious that Bartosz is right when he stresses that communication isn’t just meetings. Making this kind of project a success is to a large extent knowing the right tools and how to deploy them efficiently.

“The more distributed the project is over geography, time-zones and languages, the more you need to rely on the systems to keep it all together”, says Bartosz.

The trust to run the show

But Bartosz, what did the big picture look like? What were you responsible for? “Our team managed how we did things and Payair what we did.” From  Etteplan, this meant providing the development resources and offering a model for management and communication. This included the whole set with meetings and procedures, what tools to use and best practices for using them.

So how does this help the customer and jack in to their organization? The product owners are naturally the ones with the ultimate vision of the product. Tight involvement from them is of paramount importance. It means that they must have constant visibility into the state of the project and the functionality built so far. Remember Fabric, the tool for making it possible to easily test the latest functionality? That was one of the success factors in this project.

It worked well, and both sides were very happy with the cooperation. “We turned out to have the ideal setup for a true partnership”, Bartosz says, “Payair trusted us and let us run the show, and the product owner had a clear vision and was really engaged in the project.”

Lessons learnt

Making mistakes and learning from them is the path to excellence. Petter, what could we have done differently? “It went very well, but we could perhaps focus on clarifying the requirements even more in the beginning and pay even more attention to the non-functional ones.” Great feedback that will be remembered in the next projects.

What we learn from this collaboration is naturally that outsourcing can be so much more than just hiring developers. At its best, it can be an independent, but still tightly integrated, unit. And it’s obvious what will be in focus if you let this team run the show - combining programming expertise with the right communication and processes, ensuring the delivery of great mobile applications that solve the job do be done. Bartosz is strikingly proud of the team when he wraps up why they succeeded. His final point is words of wisdom:

“Without vision you will just execute tasks. But a team with broad vision will truly take on the mission and show craftmanship.”