From Crappiness To Happiness
When did it start?
In July 2014 our team was dealing with a lot of projects related to data handling. This was happening especially in the automotive industry with I4.0. A lot of demand for data, but the existing MES complex systems were developed by the clients themselves were simply big, money-spending elephants.
So we started Coreflux, by using a whiteboard, some pens and paper. The project name was insanely called “Old Man Bites Tenderly”, because we were just playing around. While doing so we noticed we were onto something. First it was our first experiments: new concepts were appearing, the idea for a new IoT platform was getting into shape and connectivity was the vision.
Why Coreflux?
It became clear to us that the data inside our platform was like water running, a continuing movement of large numbers of things. In one word, a FLUX. The data in our platform was decentralized but yet, it should be vital/nuclear to a company. Because information is the the central or the innermost part in a company, a CORE. So it became CoreFlux.
Straight to Work into Crappiness Zone
So we went on with our great idea and we had our new beloved Scrum Team to do it in these great Sprints we were planning. The atmosphere was enthusiastic, and we had to do it with everyone together. Chaos! Madness! We did it all…
So eventually the user stories were not getting there, we were struggling in our sprints. I was a lousy PO, my Scrum Master was a null and the team was broken. People left the project and eventually new people came. But the issue was that the team culture and proper organization weren’t there, so we decided to do the correct thing. STOP!
We really felt miserable for 6 months without even touching Coreflux or thinking of it. Especially when we went on working again for the automotive sector, for those poorly designed systems — when we knew we had a better solution. Ultimately, we knew we needed to adapt ourselves and embrace the change to be able to create CoreFlux.
So we began doing projects to learn how to organize our Sprints and our Teams. We studied hard and decided to be humble about the way we worked. We learned Lean, Agile and went hard with our retrospectives .
Eventually some big companies started to notice Setlevel’s work and asked us how we could help them. They wanted to know how we were able to flow our work.
We had evolved from crappiness in our pursuit to happiness.
We were ready to tackle CoreFlux again!
The Takeaway 2.0
We focused on reading, hearing and thinking. Not necessarily in that order, but it was important to have this training, so we were able to see where the market was going and what it was lacking.
One thing was clear: the amount of lead time it took and the lack of freedom there was to make apps, programs or systems. Some companies already had moved into that direction, but they were not focusing on the flux of information. Also, the new machine learning concepts weren’t really being implemented, and were just being done in a very customized solution. So our vision was to gather those 3 components.
Our first sprint started and some movement appeared in the design. The culture was finally there. So we adopted the name “Team Turing”, in memory of Alan Turing and we focused on the job in hand, to start something new and awesome.
After a while things started to work, becoming visible to us. The fog was finally clearing out.
We were watching our product being born, we were able to collect information not only from standard protocols but also from:
- Native PLC protocols like Siemens, Beckhoff, Omron, etc...
- WebServices like ebay, Trello, Google services and so on
- ERP systems like Odoo, SAP, Sage, etc...
But all this can be shown in good time… We have more than that.
Now we have code flowing, features appearing, we adapt whenever required to our planning and the necessity to show to everyone how excited we are about this. But at the same time, humbled by the effort and the size of the task we’ve undertaken. With the certainty that, when things are grim, we have the confidence and the strength to endure. This is our pursuit to happiness, knowing we started out of crappiness and knowing we have learned so much from it.
