Information systems are an integral part of effective business process management, so it is vital to analyze their current state before starting development. SimbirSoft’s lead analyst, Anna, will briefly touch on the reasons and nuances of such analysis.

Spoiler! Analyzing business processes can expose problems and bottlenecks in a company’s operations. This, in turn, will allow you to design an optimal system that will factor in all the business patterns and needs, boost productivity, and enable the company to grow confidently in the future.

Why analyze business process maturity?

The primary purpose of business process analysis is to help the client determine how to improve and change a particular business process to get the desired results.

Maturity is one of the key performance indicators of business processes. It reflects its logic, measurability, controllability, flexibility, and ability to evolve. Business process maturity analysis allows you to optimize processes and improve their efficiency.

This, in turn, can help you achieve your ultimate goal, reduce costs and process execution time, and make your company ready to respond to market changes quickly.

To assess the maturity of your current business processes, you first need to choose an assessment methodology, like CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration). Analyzing the results will allow you to identify bottlenecks in your business processes and help you chart the development of your future information system.

What other benefits does a business process maturity analysis offer?

• Improved product quality, which in turn leads to increased customer satisfaction.
• Cost reduction and process optimization. A maturity analysis can identify bottlenecks in a company’s operations and provide directions for optimizing specific processes.
• Process automation. The analysis will highlight the processes that need to be automated first using an information system.

Examining the maturity of business processes allows you to clarify requirements and identify technical solutions that will be effective for a particular process.

This will enable your business to achieve its goals, respond to changes in the external environment, and remain competitive in the market.

Five levels of business process maturity

Let’s briefly review the five levels of business process maturity — their essence, main characteristics, and examples.

Level 1: Initial

Typical for companies that are just starting out and have only just released their product. They engage in aggressive marketing activities, spending a lot of effort to attract customers

They have a small team and a limited budget. There are no regulations; work sequence is not defined, and some stages may be skipped altogether. The company’s goal may not be clear to its employees.

Example: a small coffee shop that has just opened. There is no business process automation yet: orders are written down by the waiters or are manually entered into a spreadsheet.

What can this business do to move on to the next stage? Identify its goal and ways to achieve it. For a coffee shop, it could be making a profit by increasing the average check and attracting new and regular customers by improving service and product quality.

The entire business process must be aligned to successfully achieve the goal. It is then important to communicate it to each employee so that they understand their impact on the overall goal.

All employees contribute to the success of the business, so their participation and involvement in processes must be active.

Job descriptions and workload plans should also be developed and distributed among the employees. This will allow the coffee shop to identify and allocate tasks and resources, keep processes running smoothly, maintain efficiency, and achieve its goals.

Level 2: Repeatable

The business has achieved its goal; the management and employees understand the processes, their jobs, and the tasks to be performed.

Processes have a logical sequence of execution. They are regulated, standardized, and can be partially automated. There are employee work and vacation schedules and process management: work planning, budgets, and risk governance. However, the issue of the final product quality has not yet been resolved.

Example: a manufacturing company that has already started optimizing its processes and implementing a systematic approach to business process management. You could say that the company produces results, but it can and should do better.

What can this business do to move on to the next stage? Analyze processes with regard to compliance with GOST and ISO standards for a specific professional field. This stage includes the development of process decomposition diagrams, i.e. their more detailed description, as well as evaluation of data flows. Particular attention should be given to regulatory documents.

During the transition, processes are described and modified to reflect industry standards. This allows us to distinguish between major and minor processes. The key business processes are geared towards the achievement of the primary goals and objectives. Their optimization and improvement contributes to the efficiency of operations.

Secondary processes have a supporting role within process maturity. They are support functions that ensure the smooth functioning of core processes. The secondary processes can be modified and optimized to improve the overall efficiency of the whole system.

During the transition, it is important to identify and categorize processes in terms of their importance and impact on outcomes. This will allow you to set priorities and focus your efforts on optimizing key processes. In doing so, pay attention to the secondary processes that need to be improved to ensure that the entire system functions effectively.

Level 3: Defined

All processes have a logical structure; there are functional links between departments and units; there is a responsible person and deadlines. The company introduces quality and process efficiency metrics. All standards and regulations comply with GOST and international ISO standards. Employees receive training on a regular basis.

At this level of maturity, the business addresses the quality of the final product but is still highly dependent on various factors and doesn’t know how to adjust to changing market situations.

Example: a large manufacturer of home appliances. The company’s processes are fine-tuned and regulated. But there is a high dependence on market conditions and a low level of serviceability.

What can this business do to move on to the next stage? Introduce performance and quality indicators for the finished product and schedule periods for monitoring said indicators. The company should develop methodologies for improving product quality. It should also design regulations or process manuals for various situations and introduce them into the production process.

Level 4: Managed

Various indicators are introduced to improve process management and control. The use of indicators allows to reduce resources consumption. For example, the introduction of an electronic document management system has allowed the company to reduce time spent on signing documents and paper costs.

Processes become flexible and can be revised and optimized based on the information gathered. The company can adapt to market changes but not as easily and effectively as at the fifth level of maturity.

Example: the Coca-Cola Company. It is actively working to optimize its business processes and implement new technologies to improve operational efficiency. It utilizes production risk management and quality control systems at all stages of production. The company has developed a risk management program that allows it to promptly respond to possible business threats and risks.

What can this business do to move on to the next stage? Focus on refining the risk management strategy and analyzing process metrics. This is a good time to review existing metrics or change the approach to measuring them.

Level 5: Optimized

This level is distinguished by the presence of innovative processes. This high-tech stage of process maturity is quite resource-intensive in terms of analyzing the collected data and organizing process changes.

The business applies new ways and tools for analyzing process metrics. It analyzes performance successes and failures. It develops and introduces a process optimization strategy.

Example: Toyota Motor Corporation. The company pays great attention to optimizing business processes and introducing new technologies to improve operational efficiency. The corporation’s most famous innovation process is the Just-In-Time system. It allows it to accurately determine customer needs and produce goods only in the required volume, thus reducing inventory holding costs and improving product quality.

Maturity is an unstable indicator. To ensure that processes are properly executed, it is necessary to continually analyze market conditions and trends, actively work on products quality, and actively engage employees in company values and philosophy.

How does analyzing business process maturity helps in designing an information system?

The results of business process maturity analysis can be applied to the following stages of information system development:

• Formulating system requirements. You need to determine what functions the system will perform, what data it will need, and what process management and control mechanisms it will contain.
• Developing system architecture. The requirements will help you in developing the system’s architecture by identifying bottlenecks and problems that may arise during the implementation phase. This will ensure the system’s high performance and reliability in the future.
• Information system development. The analysis helps developers to better understand the system’s functionality.
• Testing. Testers should test the system against requirements related to the maturity of the client’s business processes.
• System launch. Executed only after a successful test phase.

Ultimately, assessing the maturity of business processes helps to select the best solutions for the business and increases the chances of successful development.

Case study

A process maturity assessment conducted for a large company over several months helped the client decide between developing a proprietary solution or purchasing an out-of-the-box product with subsequent customization. During the assessment, we studied manufacturing industry regulations and standards and built a model of the company’s processes, which involved grouping them into areas and describing their main indicators.

Based on the results of the process maturity analysis, a decision was made to purchase a ready-made product with subsequent adaptation and integration into the company’s existing production processes. This allowed the client to quickly adapt to the new system and improve the efficiency of their processes.

Why do you need to know that?

Assessing the maturity of business processes is an important part of information system development. As you have already realized, it shows how much your business processes are ready for automation and helps to identify problem areas that need to be optimized.

Keep in mind that business process maturity is a dynamic marker. To maintain the system’s effectiveness as a whole, the analysis should be carried out with a certain periodicity: once a month, a quarter, or a year. Each company chooses the frequency itself.

Why is it better to outsource business process maturity analysis? There are several reasons for this:

The expertise of a professional contractor in business process management and maturity assessment methodologies.

Independence. Thanks to the lack of family, psychological, or material dependence on the company, external consultants can offer an independent point of view that allows for an objective assessment of the current state of processes.

Experience. The outsourcing company employees have experience working on various projects in different fields and subject areas. This allows them to quickly identify the problem and propose ways to optimize processes.

Tools. External experts are proficient in various technologies and tools needed to conduct the assessment.

A comprehensive solution. An IT outsourcer can offer not only business process assessment but also the subsequent development and implementation of an information system; they may also provide specialists that will strengthen your team.

It’s up to you to decide! Just remember that business maturity analysis is not an end in itself but a tool that helps you achieve your business goals.

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Information System Development and Business Process Maturity: Choosing a Solution was originally published in SimbirSoft World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The market for cloud solutions is growing rapidly worldwide. Understandably, this growth can be attributed to the numerous advantages cloud computing offers to organizations of all sizes.

For example, scalability. Now, there is no need to purchase equipment with a surplus to handle peak loads. In the cloud, you can easily connect new servers as needed and release them immediately after use. Moreover, the cost of renting equipment significantly decreases when it is shared and used for various computing resources among a large number of subscribers.

Another undeniable advantage is the elimination of the need to maintain a large team of technical specialists. Now, there is no need to monitor the functionality of the equipment, purchase, and replace faulty parts, as these responsibilities are handled by the cloud service providers. The user can focus on development and business activities.

Currently, more than 90% of large organizations are using cloud solutions. The greatest growth is observed in the Internet of Things (IoT), Content as a Service (CaaS), and machine learning fields. SimbirSoft also has such projects under its belt. For example, we are participating in the development of an optical character recognition and fact extraction system for a large American company. Let’s focus on it in more detail.

The customer has a vast electronic repository containing approximately 700 million scanned newspaper pages. Periodically, there is a need to process all this information and extract various facts about specific events from it. For example, to find all wedding announcements and create a knowledge base about who, when, and with whom marriage was registered.

The architecture of a typical system for solving such a task can be represented as a pipeline (using the Pipe and Filters pattern). At each stage, the information is analyzed, transformed, filtered, and passed to the next stage.

Requests to the system arrive unevenly, with periods of downtime and peak loads. Therefore, the system should automatically scale, adjusting to such conditions. Cloud solutions are perfectly suited for this purpose. Additionally, the customer is already operating in AWS (Amazon Web Services), a commercial public cloud supported and developed by Amazon.

Let’s examine the architecture of an element in our AWS pipeline:

• The task flow processing code is written in Java.
• TensorFlow, a machine learning system, is used for text analysis.
• Data preparation for TensorFlow is implemented in Python.
• For high scalability demands, AWS Lambda is used for data preparation.
• Computing power in the cloud is provided by Amazon EC2 service.
• AWS Auto Scaling is used for automatic scaling.

We primarily use ready-made solutions, and the architecture appears straightforward at first glance. However, there are crucial cloud-specific details that require attention.

The primary concern is cost. Most of the cloud services are paid, though their individual rates may be relatively low. For instance, the cost of the cheapest Linux server is around 40 cents per day. Yet, automatic scaling can increase the system’s cost significantly. During peak loads, our cluster expanded to several hundred machines. Hence, it’s crucial to set limits on the cluster size to stay within budget.

Before deploying the system into production, we always make a rough cost estimate, and this task is challenging. Amazon’s pricing structure is quite intricate, with certain subtleties. The AWS Pricing Calculator helps simplify the process to some extent. Once the estimation is done, we track its accuracy using Cloudability.

If you decide to work with the cloud independently, enable AWS Billing Alert on your account. This helps avoid unpleasant surprises at the end of the month when you receive the bill for services. And be sure to set up two-factor authentication since there have been cases of account breaches and launching expensive computations.

You can decrease operational costs by enhancing the efficiency of computing resource usage. We monitor CPU and GPU utilization on the running server, aiming for it to stay above 90%. Selecting the appropriate server type (or EC2 instance) is crucial for achieving this. AWS offers hundreds of different instance types, varying in cost, RAM size, number and type of processors, GPU availability, and more.

In our case, it was crucial to make optimal use of TensorFlow:

• choose between TFServing and Embedded TensorFlow;
• make the choice between CPU or GPU model;
• determine the amount of RAM required for computations;
• calculate the optimal number of threads;
• configure batch processing of requests.

Effective load testing helps make the right decision based on accurate measurements rather than intuition.

Significantly improving the scalability of the system can be achieved with the help of Lambda Functions. We use them for pre-processing data before sending it to TensorFlow. The code of the Lambda function can be executed without the need to provision and manage servers. You only pay for the actual computation time. However, there are some nuances:

• charges are based on the number of requests to the functions and their duration, but the price depends on the amount of allocated memory;
• increasing the memory size also leads to a proportional increase in computational resources (up to a certain limit). This trick allows achieving high function performance at the same cost;
• the processing time is rounded up to 100 ms (and sometimes it significantly affects the cost);
• there is a limit on the number of requests to the function per unit of time, and exceeding this limit leads to throttling and rejections;
• the number of rejections can be significantly reduced by properly selecting Concurrency and Reserved Concurrency parameters;
• if a Lambda function is not used for some time, its code is removed from the container, and the subsequent start will take longer than usual (cold start).

In this project, we successfully dealt with all technical complexities, and ultimately, the use of cloud services allowed us to focus on business tasks and spend less time on infrastructure. During the project, we once again confirmed the importance of load testing and cost estimation. Thanks to them, we promptly identified and reworked the most expensive part of the system. As a result, we successfully met both the deadlines and the budget. The discrepancy between the estimated and actual results was less than 5%.

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Using Machine Learning with TensorFlow and AWS Lambda was originally published in SimbirSoft World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Be passionate about your work

A leader ignites enthusiasm within their team, encouraging them to constantly strive to improve the project and make the product better. In the endless flow of tasks, assignments, and communications, it is important not to forget about this aspect. If you don’t have a passion for your work, what can you expect from your team?

Chats

A significant part of our communication takes place through messaging. To ensure that group chats are as beneficial as possible and avoid the desire to mute them, it is necessary to establish and always adhere to several rules.

1. One message is always better than a series of impulsive messages
You can create and document this rule in the chat’s description. When adding a new team member, draw their attention to this aspect. If the rule is violated, highlight the advantages of a “clean and organized” chat and clearly formulated messages on a daily basis.
Text messages are great because they allow you to review what you are about to say, check for unnecessary information, ensure the problem/question is described correctly, and ensure that the message is clear to our colleagues. This tactic allows you to better get your pint across to the team and not make them waste their time sorting through your messages.

2. Threads
If the messenger you are using has comment threads, I encourage you to take advantage of them. This prevents the chat from drowning in unread messages and makes sure you do not lose important information.

3. Ask all questions in the group chat
Ask questions in the group chat, not in DMs. Different people may approach you with the same question privately. By discussing the issue in the general chat, the entire team can see the answer, and the leader doesn’t have to spend time explaining it to each individual. There is also a chance that one colleague asks a question, but another colleague answers it. Once again, this saves your time because other employees also have the same information.
And lastly, make sure people aren’t afraid to ask questions for fear of sounding silly. In our company, we say that a silly question is the unasked question. However, colleagues may ask the same question ten times. It’s understandable that this can be frustrating because “I’ve already explained it to you, don’t you read the chat?!” In such situations, it is necessary to analyze whether it is crucial information that deserves more attention than being lost in the chat. It is better to document it in a knowledge base, pin the message, or send a corporate email notification.

Meetings

Daily status meetings and meetings aimed at solving complex problems and tasks take a lot of time. Here are a few things you can do to make sure this time is not wasted.

1. Clearly define the topic and objectives
When organizing a meeting, clearly communicate its purpose in advance.
For example, discussing deadlines for implementing a new feature. By informing your team about the topic and goals of the meeting, you give them a chance to prepare and open the necessary task.

2. Limit the number of participants
We all want maximum transparency to keep the whole team up to date with the project. But the larger the project, the higher the likelihood that the team will spend their entire workday ‌on the phone. Fifty people gather to listen to a discussion of five participants for an hour.
Choose the meeting participants in advance. To invite people, tag them or send them emails. And to keep things transparent, send a recap of the meeting to the group chat.

3. Moderate the process
If you are the one organizing the meeting, it is your job to keep track of time and make sure everyone sticks to the plan (do not deviate from the topic of the meeting; other issues can be discussed at different meetings).

4. Recap the meeting
Don’t forget to recap the meeting: sum up the issues you have discussed, the decisions you have made, the deadlines, and the people responsible.
Depending on the topic of the meeting, you may post the recap in the group chat, add it to the knowledge base, send it to everyone via email, etc.

5. 1+1 meetings
A leader must always stay in touch with their team, and not just get status updates from them. It is important to monitor the team’s mood. If any of your colleagues are annoyed or upset, this will affect their work.
The task of a leader is to identify problems and find out if they can help. Is the problem a complex task? Or is it a conflict within the team? Such cases fall within the leader’s responsibility. It becomes more challenging when it’s a personal issue. However, it is important for the leader to show involvement and make the person feel valued and cared for, rather than just a resource or a cog in the machine.

Retrospective

This is a broad topic. In this article, we will focus on praise. And you can do it not only during retrospectives. Acknowledge the personal contributions of each individual. For example, “Thank you very much, colleagues, for the wonderful work in this sprint. If it weren’t for you, the release would not have been possible.” These are nice words, but they feel as if they are addressed to everyone and to no one at the same time.

A good practice is to recognize the contributions and achievements of each team member during the sprint and highlight them during the retrospective.

Collaboration with other teams and departments

If the team has questions regarding analytics, development, or testing, or if they need to learn something from related specialists, it is the leader’s task to establish “communication bridges” so that everyone knows who to approach and with what questions.

Let there be someone in each team who can provide guidance to colleagues from other areas or systems. This way, no question will go unanswered, and people will not have to bombard their colleagues with DMs trying to find something out.

Assigning tasks

Clear and simple tasks are the dream of most employees. A leader can make it a reality by putting each task in a task tracker. Even if it’s “just” writing a demo script, conducting documentation reviews, reorganizing a database, or trying to implement a new tool, and so on.

By documenting tasks in a task tracker, you ensure that they won’t be forgotten and are clear to the team. And to make this magic work, remember that a task name alone is not enough! The task should include: its description, deadline, performer, and any necessary additional information. For example, a link to the section in the knowledge base that needs reorganization.

Summing up

Building communication is just like developing an application or doing anything else in your area of expertise — it’s work that you improve through experience. The more you engage in it, the better you become. To develop your communication skills, you need to take the initiative and tackle any task that will allow you to improve them head-on.

Building Effective Team Collaboration, and Eliminating Numerous Messages and Unnecessary Calls was originally published in SimbirSoft World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Let’s talk about what to do to make everything go haywire.

Don’t create a workflow

Let the developers figure out how to work on their own, and your task status will acquire an additional characteristic: “chaos.” Team members will spend extra time clarifying details that could have been used to complete project tasks.

Thanks to a workflow, the team works more efficiently since all specialists are on the same page and understand the current status of each feature’s implementation. It helps quickly identify at which stage the process is stuck and reduces time gaps between work blocks.

Do not conduct sprint planning with the team

Team members don’t need to understand the goals and deadlines of the next iteration. Let everyone implement tasks according to their own discretion. After all, you want the end result to surprise you.

By involving the team in sprint planning, you create a unified picture of project implementation, taking into account all the details. Perhaps someone on the team has already worked with the chosen technology and knows about the nuances and hidden complexities that they can share with everyone. This person can caution against making wrong decisions and provide suggestions on simplifying tasks. Having no plan will likely result in disproportionate workloads or incorrect prioritization, pushing the project towards missing deadlines.

Overburden the team

Burnout impossible to take a break. Insert a comma after the first word, and you’ll be accompanied by passivity and unproductivity throughout the project.

When specialists can complete their tasks within the designated timeframe without exceeding an 8-hour workday, they have enough free time for rest and recuperation. Such a balance allows them to approach matters not merely as executors but with a creative mindset. For instance, they can contribute ideas for task implementation.

Do not assign responsibilities and do not delegate

Why should a leader develop employees, cultivate their sense of responsibility, and create a safety net for themselves when everything can be piled onto their own shoulders? After the tenth burnout, their body will surely develop immunity (spoiler: no).

Concentrating duties on one person will lead to reduced engagement from all team members, and they won’t feel their significance. If a Team Lead is temporarily unable to perform their duties due to illness or business trips, no one will replace them. As a result, the risk of project suspension will rise.

Delegation allows expanding the team’s competence and creating accountability for each participant’s results, while enabling the leader to maintain productivity and work-life balance.

Concentrate the entire knowledge base in the minds of one or two developers

The broader the specialists’ outlook, the greater the likelihood of receiving valuable advice from them to improve work. A true leader doesn’t need any suggestions.

When there are only a few knowledge holders on the project, the bus factor becomes significant. This term refers to the number of team members whose prolonged absence would put the work in a crisis situation.

You need to think in advance about how to ensure knowledge circulation within the team, appoint responsible individuals, and distribute complex tasks among different developers. Discussing challenging aspects of the project is best done together with all participants. This way, the “supermen” of the team can document information about their implemented solutions in an easy-to-understand format and provide the best course of action in different conditions.

Don’t give feedback

Team members should understand you on an intuitive level. And if that doesn’t happen, it’s the employee’s fault — replace them until you find the right one.

After all, you’re not working with robots! Feedback is important for every team member. It can raise motivation levels and highlight areas for growth. It’s always pleasant to hear from more experienced colleagues about your accomplishments and discuss how to handle tasks even better.

Don’t do retrospectives

Why waste more time? You’ve already had plenty of meetings and communications on the project.

Rumors have it that retrospectives help the team develop! During discussions, participants collectively identify areas for growth, ways of improvement, and distribute tasks for implementing specific enhancements, fostering team responsibility. It can even lead to Kaizen!

We hope our bits of bad advice, or rather doing things the opposite way, have been helpful! For more information on project management, read our latest article: The Role of the Team Leader in Managing the IT Team.

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Bad Advice for Team Management was originally published in SimbirSoft World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’ll talk about the approaches that helped us at SimbirSoft to implement more than 900 solutions for businesses and train more than 80 team leaders within the company.

There are several management roles that may speed up the implementation of large-scale IT projects. Among them is the team leader, an experienced developer who manages the IT team and bears responsibility for the technical management of the project.

What tasks does the team leader help to solve in the IT project?

Owners of IT products are often asked whether ‌team leader participation in the project is mandatory. According to our observations, self-organization is sometimes possible in start-ups or small projects at the initial stages of development. And if you need to reduce time-to-market or avoid risks, then you normally cannot do without a team leader. But foremost, it is needed in large-scale projects and distributed IT teams.

Examples of the team leader’s tasks in the project:

• create a team and microclimate within it;
• ensure compliance with deadlines and other requirements within the project;
• implement and maintain communications within the team, between teams and with customer representatives.

The team leader also monitors the workload of the IT team during peak loads, for example, in relation to the emergence of new tasks, withdrawal or replacement of experts, allocation of sub teams and appointment of employees in charge. In addition, the team leader decides on the redistribution of tasks or the expansion of the team.

Case study. The team of one of our long-term projects consisted of backend and frontend developers, an analyst, a QA, a designer, a team leader and a product manager. In preparation for the release, requirements suddenly changed and deadlines shifted. As a result, together with the customer, we decided to temporarily expand the team so as not to overload employees with overtime work. As the most urgent tasks were completed, we gradually released new specialists and switched them to other projects. This approach made it possible to speed up ‌app development and ensure an adequate load on the employees involved in the project.

If external experts participate in the development of the project, along with the customer’s team, one of the team leader’s tasks is to arrange processes in such a way as to preserve expertise and key artifacts on the customer’s side:

• source code with comments;
• ToR and documentation;
• directories and APIs;
• business process notations;
• architecture;
• prototypes and design layouts;
• deployment guides and tools;
• test cases, autotests, testing documentation;
• guides, workflow, and regulations.

If there is a project implementation history, up-to-date documentation, a knowledge base and source code, the product owner becomes a full-fledged owner of the intellectual deliverables. In addition, it will allow them to manage the product throughout its life cycle, make changes and involve new teams in ‌development as necessary in the future. It also allows the team to refer to the project requirements or documentation at any time.

What a team leader should be able to do

In addition to the above management functions, the team leader as an experienced developer has ‌good technical expertise and bears responsibility for the entire technical part of the project. The team leader takes part in selecting the appropriate technology stack and preparing technical documentation and, therefore, must have the following hard skills:

• architecture development, coding, code review;
• optimization of the development process;
• control of the project’s compliance with technical requirements.

What skills and abilities a project team leader needs to develop to achieve success

To successfully achieve project goals together with the IT team, the team leader needs to develop the following soft skills:

• Communicability. Arranging oral and written communication is a necessary and important skill for the team leader.
• Responsibility. The team leader should demonstrate maximum responsibility for the result in order to create the required atmosphere and culture within the team, where each employee is responsible for their part of the work and tasks.
• Delegating. The team leader should be able to correctly distribute tasks among team members depending on their professionalism and experience, taking into account their preferences and aspirations.
• Motivation. The team leader is the liaison between the IT team members. The motivation of other participants depends on the team leader’s motivation and ability to charge with positive energy and inspire for the result.
• Effectiveness. To achieve results within the project scope, a good team leader, firstly, clearly understands the goals, knows where their team is going, and can explain the goals for each participant. Secondly, the team leader should be able to quickly find the root cause of the problem, take the initiative and quickly make a suitable decision.
• Growth. Team leaders must support the professional growth of the team and match the colleagues’ skills by constantly developing technical expertise and other skills.

Conclusion

The team leader, like any manager, needs to be able to feel the mood of the IT team and timely identify disruptions in the processes.

The following measures help improve the effectiveness of the team management process:

• Flexible approach to team building, the possibility of reinforcement and rotation.
• Implementation of relevant management practices, development processes, and roles.
• Improvement of the microclimate and team synergy.

Our employees can master these approaches at the Team Leader Academy and with the help of other corporate training programs. For your self-study, you can read the books that we specifically selected for you.

Useful books on project and team management:

1. Scrum: A Revolutionary Approach to Building Teams, Beating Deadlines, and Boosting Productivity by Jeff Sutherland.

The book describes how the approach works and highlights its advantages.

2. Improving Agile Retrospectives: Helping Teams Become More Efficient by Marc Loeffler.

The book contains proven practices and approaches for retrospectives, as well as detailed examples that help to understand project mistakes and easily find a way out of the situation.

3. Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg.

The book contains recommendations that will help the team to successfully use Scrum. It will be useful for both beginners and those who are already familiar with this methodology.

4. Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman.

The author explains how to learn to listen to the interlocutor and accept their point of view, and also shares practices that will help control your emotions at work.

Learn more about how to create an MVP app that is both convenient for users and easy for the team to develop: How to Make an MVP App That Everyone Will Love

Join our Medium community to keep up-to-date with our experts’ insights: How a Quality Assurance Policy Should Actually Work

Contact us to get a free consultation with estimated delivery dates for your project: request@simbirsoft.com

The Role of the Team Leader in Managing the IT Team was originally published in SimbirSoft World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We want to share our experience and explain how we investigate ‌performance, identify and eliminate bottlenecks, and determine the fault tolerance of the system.

Load Testing Stages

Load testing is part of the system performance audit. First, we define the goals, describe the required load indicators, and identify the issues. This is a study which involves the collaboration between all team members, including the developer, the architect, and DevOps.

Next, we proceed directly to ‌load testing. As a result, we generated a report with data on peak performance, key performance indicators, time of responses to user requests, system resource utilization, and description of critical resources.

Based on this report, we provide our recommendations. By following them, our customers can themselves optimize the performance or assign this process to us.

The works are implemented in accordance with the identified issues. For example, this could involve ‌code optimization or eliminating bottlenecks. The list of specific tasks depends on the test results. We also ran tests to determine the effectiveness of these changes.

Let’s discuss a case where an IT system needs load testing.

Dealing with a High Volume of Users

If you are preparing a large-scale advertising campaign, planning to centralize or merge systems, expect a surge in demand, your IT product will have to deal with a high volume of customers. It is a good practice to identify in advance your system limits in terms of users. This is where load testing could be helpful.

What you get:

• identifying the capacity and limits of acceptable load;
• ensuring advance detection of problem areas.

Our projects involving ‌load testing included a major fast food restaurant. The partner forecasted an upsurge in mobile traffic. In two weeks, we ensured the stable operation of the app by doubling the system resiliency.

Saving an IT System at a Critical Point

If you skip performing ‌load testing in advance, your product may not be able to deal with a high volume of users. This can damage your business reputation and erode the loyalty of your customers. The reasons may include the lack of hardware resources, non-optimized code, or obsolete hardware.

What you get:

• optimizing system performance;
• preserving user traffic;
• mitigating reputational damage.

We addressed such issues faced by one of our customers following a promotional campaign. The upsurge in users led to a performance glitch in the mobile app. This increased the loading time on devices and, when the response time was more than 1 minute, the app would display a message that the server is unavailable. As the issue caused frustration among the users, the situation required them to take some urgent steps.

We promptly responded to the incident and, within two days, optimized API queries and restored the app’s operation. This resulted in a 15-fold performance increase.

Implementing Continuous Optimization

The smooth operation will be of no help to your product if you ignore regular procedures. These may include the code optimization, database optimization (queries, indexing, etc.) or, less often, the transition to more relevant technology or version, introduction of such practices as the transfer of static content to CDN servers, use of distributed infrastructure, and much more.

As a result, your IT system will always be fast and rank higher in search results than those of your competitors.

What you get:

• better resource performance;
• readiness for high loads;
• user retention;
• competitive advantage.

A mobile IT product, that we worked with, had no serious flaws other than poor resilience to a workload with a long response time and limited number of concurrent users. There was no assurance in the system’s stability leading to doubts on whether the servers could handle an increase in the load or recover quickly from a system failure.

Our test automation experts checked if the system meets performance requirements. It turned out that the bandwidth was poor, with performance below the required level, while the limits and configuration files had suboptimal settings.

We implemented the comprehensive work to modify the configuration of the hardware and operating system parameters, reconfigure the connection pool and application server, and change indexing settings for database tables.

Following this optimization, the system can now handle more than five thousand concurrent users. The bandwidth increased 15-fold, and the server is responding much faster to key queries. We localized critical resources for further optimization, selected and checked the server configuration for stable operation of the app.

Using Life Hacks for Smooth Operation

Based on our experience, we made recommendations on how to ensure the effective operation of your IT system:

1. Conduct load testing regularly or before an expected increase in traffic. This can help you identify critical points and prepare an optimization plan.
2. Hire an experienced team of DevOps specialists. Implement internal resource monitoring, get regular reports and monitor the load. For example, when the server runs out of space or has performance issues, you will have time to prevent system failure and expand resources.
3. Set up the automation of your order-taking system. This point is important for retail, where the key management decisions are related to improving the quality and speed of customer service. IT systems enable you to eliminate the need for maintaining a large warehouse. For example, when you run out of ingredients, the procurement system will simply send an order to the supplier.

Learn more about how to create an MVP app that is both convenient for users and easy for the team to develop: How to Make an MVP App That Everyone Will Love

Join our Medium community to keep up-to-date with our experts’ insights: How a Quality Assurance Policy Should Actually Work

Contact us to get a free consultation with estimated delivery dates for your project: request@simbirsoft.com

When and How We Use Load Testing was originally published in SimbirSoft World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The quality assurance policy often emerges as a “rework” that a team performs based on their own experience or to avoid repeating other people’s typical mistakes.

Let’s consider such mistakes on the example of an internal project that our company worked on at the early stage of our growth many years ago.

Where It All Began

The project was launched a long time ago, the scope of work was known and planned as large and small sprints. A hard deadline was scheduled for one of the most significant dates for the company: it was necessary to implement an important functionality, on which the tasks of various departments depended.

Usually, the team worked steadily, its members were constantly changing, as employees temporarily released from commercial projects were involved in the project implementation. That day, as usual, the team checked the task tracker and began to perform the current tasks slowly but surely.

The morning did not promise any problems until we received a chat message: “Guys, we have problems, we will not have time to release on time.” When they realized that they would not meet the deadline, they urgently called in an expert who was supposed to help analyze the situation and find out what went wrong.

What We Found Out

Background: The release involved a two-week sprint. The team consisted of a PM who was involved only occasionally, three developers and one QA specialist. The estimation was 150 hours, taking into account the diversion of experts to other projects.

The study found:

• By the middle of the sprint’s first week, when transferring the project from one PM to another, they forgot to explain part of the feature implementation logic. The roadmap was not updated for a long time, and the description of tasks in the existing document was insufficient. When they recalled this feature, which didn’t happen until the middle of the second week of the sprint, it added another 60 hours of development and retesting.
• At the end of the first week of the sprint, the most knowledgeable developer was pulled away from the project, and a new one was brought in without any onboarding. At the end of the second week, the lead developer returned to the project and rewrote the newbie’s code. The result was extra 40 hours of development.
• When changing the QA manager, it also turned out that they did not prepare documentation for that internal project. As a result, the new QA manager spent another 25 hours to understand the logic.

Our Findings

Instead of 150 hours of development, the project required 275 hours — more than the planned two weeks. The budget was exceeded twice. And these are only the most obvious problems that were revealed on the project.

How to avoid such problems Experts of our Quality Assurance Service share their recommendations. So, in this case, you need the following:

• prepare and harmonize the project transfer regulations,
• appoint persons in charge of internal projects, who will be the most knowledgeable on the project,
• implement a task setting template (which is always a plus) to simplify the work,
• introduce a mandatory minimum for documentation, including a document on onboarding of new employees.

Very often we can say something like “the project is simple, then why complicate something there, because it is faster to just finish it off than to comply with the rules and standards.” In most cases, such a project is unlikely to be completed successfully. Minimum principles and standards that must be followed must always be in place, even in the company’s internal projects.

Our Conclusions:

• Even in the simplest project, you need to work on the customer expectations, even if the customer is your own company, and create requirements on their basis.
• Introduction of engineering practices (code writing standards, Code Review and others) will take time, but it will reduce the time required for future support.
• All the best practices of Scrum: demos, daily meetings and retrospectives are important to adapt to the tasks of a particular project and to the internal development culture.

Learn more about how to create an MVP app that is both convenient for users and easy for the team to develop: How to Make an MVP App That Everyone Will Love

Join our Medium community to keep up-to-date with our experts’ insights: Chaos vs. Order: Implementing a Development Culture for Better Business Results

How a Quality Assurance Policy Should Actually Work was originally published in SimbirSoft World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Computer Vision (CV) is a field of artificial intelligence related to image and video processing. It includes a set of techniques that allow computers to “see” and analyze received information — identify objects and people, recognize text, register movements, highlight homogeneous elements in images and videos, and much more.

In this article, together with the SimbirSoft ML team, we will explore the main applications of computer vision, problems, trends, and prospects for CV technology development.

CV Trends and Research Areas

Modern computer vision technologies allow companies across industries to tackle their business problems efficiently. The availability of industrial-level frameworks and libraries, numerous data sets, pre-trained models of various architectures, as well as a variety of efficient computing platforms (server-based, mobile, and embedded) facilitates this trend.

Here are some examples of traditional computer vision applications:

• Self-driving vehicles: traffic control, route navigation, and control stimulation.
• Medicine: interpretation of CT, MRI, ultrasound and X-ray images.
• Production: process control, detection of product defects.
• Agriculture and forestry: monitoring of crops and weed growth, plantation inventory.

In recent years, the enhancements to artificial intelligence algorithms have led to CV technologies penetrating almost every area of everyday life: traffic control on the roads, face recognition and search through databases of criminals and missing people, counting store visitors and analyzing the availability of goods on the shelves, monitoring the use of personal protective equipment, etc.

A significant share of the CV market falls on the entertainment and shopping sector. The ViewEvo mobile application, for which we have developed a design layout, allows you to recognize and highlight various products in a photo or video: clothes, shoes, and accessories. After that, the service searches for the products or alternatives in partner online stores.

The successful application of computer vision technologies to solve a variety of problems allows us to switch to fully automatic systems, excluding human participation in decision-making. The most common example of such systems is self-driving vehicles.

Another important trend is the transition from the analysis of static images to the analysis of dynamic scenes. CV technologies allow us to identify behavior patterns of objects, and then analyze how they interact with each other over time.

The most common technology for computer vision today is ultra-precise neural networks. They help identify local features that are characteristic of various objects and then use them to solve applied problems: detecting objects, classifying them and even generating new images.

To ensure the necessary efficiency of calculations and high speed of CV algorithms, especially on mobile and embedded devices, optimization techniques such as quantization, pruning, and knowledge distillation are often used.

We highlight the following major research areas in computer vision:

• Unsupervised and self-supervised learning algorithms. They will limit the use or completely abandon the expensive and time-consuming procedure of data markup in the data set.
• Application of the “transformer” architecture models, which have proven themselves in text processing tasks. The attention mechanism used by such models enables a more flexible approach to identifying patterns in images.
• Reliability of models: ensuring their correct operation in the presence of noise on input images, deliberate attacks on the algorithm in order to achieve a certain behavior from it (adversarial attacks), changes in statistical distributions in the input data, etc.
• Model interpretability is an explanation of why the model produces a specific result.

CV Applications

Today, computer vision technologies are widely used both in production and research, as well as in the daily lives of people. Let’s look at a few examples.

Security

In 2018, Hong Kong-based startup SenseTime raised $600 million in investment, becoming the most expensive private artificial intelligence project. The developers presented facial recognition and remote detection systems, as well as a solution for self-driving vehicles. A year after the launch, the company was worth, according to various estimates, from 3 to 4.5 billion dollars, and the project itself received the support of the Chinese government.

In addition to searching and comparing people’s faces, video surveillance systems that use computer vision algorithms make it possible to detect various objects, monitor the situation indoors and in urban facilities, as well as protect workers in hazardous industries.

However, along with the obvious benefits that computer vision brings in terms of improving the safety of life, there are factors holding back the development of facial recognition technology. Firstly, there are legislative restrictions related to the protection of personal data of people. Secondly, there are ethical issues related to the problem of human rights violations. SenseTime, for instance, has been repeatedly mentioned in the context of the use of CV technologies against Muslims living in China.

Despite this, security remains the main use of computer vision both in Russia and worldwide. According to a 2018 TAdviser study, 32% of CV solutions come from video surveillance and security. Experts called this area of activity the most promising for computer vision in the near future.

Retail

Today, for most stores, being able to learn about the customer experience and offer a personalized experience is the key to success. Technology helps retailers collect customer data and audit outlets, thereby contributing to sales growth. Let’s look at examples of how CV helps businesses increase their KPIs.

• On Shelf Availability (OSA): control of goods on the shelf

Cameras installed in the salesroom analyze images of the racks. If a product is out of stock, the neural network sends a notification to the system. Everyone benefits from this: both the seller, whose buyer did not leave the store to buy the product from a competitor, and the manufacturer, who received valuable information about the movement of goods on the shelf.

• Safety and theft protection

Facial recognition systems can scan the faces of customers at the entrance to the outlet and immediately check the resulting data against the black lists of well-known shoplifters. Such solutions are also able to distinguish store employees from unauthorized persons, preventing the latter from entering restricted areas.

• Queue control

Long queues reduce customer loyalty, and floating visitor flow indicators affect the objectivity of KPIs for employees. As a result, all this increases staff turnover and affects business. The neural network determines when the number of people in the queue exceeds the acceptable value, and sends a notification to the outlet monitoring system. The technology also makes it possible to determine the average time after which the customer leaves the queue and refuses to buy. Retailers use the collected data, among other things, to optimize the number of personnel in the outlet.

• Heat maps

The neural network analyzes data on the movement of customers on the sales floor, showing popular and “cold” areas of the store. They help to confirm or refute the existing rules for displaying goods and attract buyers to certain shelves. Heat maps help marketing specialists to plan the retail space more precisely: from posting information about promotions in the busiest places of the store to selling space to tenants in shopping centers.

Industry

In 2015, the founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, first used the Fourth Industrial Revolution (or Industry 4.0) term. This concept includes a new approach to production, based on the penetration of technology into all spheres of the economy.

One of the characteristic features of Industry 4.0 is the introduction of artificial intelligence for industrial enterprises. The Machine Vision term is also applied to computer vision technologies used in manufacturing. MV fully automates assembly, defect detection, laser cutting and other processes that previously required special training.

For example, SimbirSoft experts took part in the development of an application that keeps records of raw materials in the forest industry. Using machine learning algorithms, the system allows you to measure the diameter of tree trunks on a photo with an accuracy of up to a centimeter.

Occupational health and safety is another important area of application of machine vision in the industrial sector. Facial recognition systems are widely used for control panels or production lines, where it is important to ensure a high level of alertness. Thus, the systems help to make sure that the expert controls the production process in accordance with the regulations. In the event of an accident, they inform the staff about the location and criticality of the incident.

Medicine

The introduction of computer vision technologies in medicine opens up opportunities for the study of a wide range of diseases. Algorithms analyze medical images (X-rays, MRI, ultrasound) and help improve the accuracy of disease diagnosis. In particular, the image may contain small details that are not noticeable to the human eye, which the CV system recognizes almost unmistakably.

For example, the InnerEye system developed by Microsoft is capable to analyze the presence of abnormal formations based on computed tomography data and is widely used in radiation therapy for the treatment of cancer. The company also advocates for the democratization of CV technologies in the medical industry. In 2020, the InnerEye software package was made public, allowing healthtech providers to integrate machine learning models into their own systems.

Neural network algorithms are also used in computer diagnostics to plan personal therapy and increase the accuracy of decision-making. In telemedicine, CV technologies help to conduct primary diagnosis of certain diseases on a photo without the need to visit the doctor’s office.

Current CV Issues

Despite its progressiveness and relevance, computer vision inevitably faces a number of technical problems and limitations:

• High demand for marked data. Among all the stages of preparing datasets for the development of computer vision algorithms, the marking up is the most time-consuming and costly process. At the same time, the number of images and the markup quality largely determine the quality of the final models.
• As a consequence, the implementation of computer vision algorithms can be difficult in areas for which the collection and marking of a large enough data set is difficult or impossible.
• Interpretability of the results of the algorithm. The traditional approach to machine learning models is the Black Box. Both the input and output data is available to us, but we cannot say how the system arrived at the output result. This lack of interpretability results in distrust of CV algorithms, especially in areas with a high cost of error (e.g., medicine).

The Future of Computer Vision

According to TAdviser’s preliminary estimate, the Russian CV market volume could reach almost RUB 40 billion by 2025, a fivefold increase since the study was conducted in 2019.

Today, the following trends in the development of CV technologies can be distinguished:

• The emergence of effective algorithms and learning methods for training high-quality models on small datasets.

Today, training a model for a new task requires from several hundred to several thousand marked images. Collecting and marking up such a dataset is costly or, in some cases, not possible at all. Thus, the industry needs to learn how to handle data more efficiently.

• Development of multimodal models capable of processing several data types simultaneously, for example, images and text.

Existing models are able to more or less accurately work either with texts or with images. However, these types of data are often found together: text with illustrations, videos with subtitles and comments, etc. There is every reason to believe that using a single model to handle such situations will simplify the algorithm development process and significantly improve the accuracy of the results.

• New use cases are emerging, such as answering questions about images and videos that are asked and generated in natural language.

Today, image processing is usually reduced to classification, segmentation or object detection. Interpretation and transformation of the output into a human-understandable result, filtering and other operations are implemented by separate algorithms or additional models. The idea of combining the model and post-processing algorithms in a single model seems quite promising. A video available at the input is converted into a text description of the occurred events at the output. If the input is a described situation, then the output is a set of images depicting this situation. If the input is an image and a question, then the output is the answer to the question based on the image. Such a solution will improve the quality of the results and simplify the development.

Closing Remarks

The scope of application of CV technologies is expanding year after year. There are fewer and fewer branches of business where neural networks cannot come to our aid and sometimes completely replace manual labor or automate routine tasks.

Attitudes toward computer vision can be ambiguous. On the one hand, this technology raises many ethical questions and is regulated at the legislative level in many countries. On the other hand, it is a powerful research tool that businesses are increasingly turning to amid growing interest in artificial intelligence algorithms. According to all forecasts, the already rapidly developing computer vision market is expected to grow even faster in the foreseeable future.

Here you can see how we have been using Data Science to solve our customers’ problems for more than 10 years.

Learn more about how to create an MVP app that is both convenient for users and easy for the team to develop: How to Make an MVP App That Everyone Will Love

Join our Medium community to keep up-to-date with our experts’ insights: Top 6 Business Tips to Avoid Mistakes in Product Development

Computer Vision: Trends, Market, and Prospects was originally published in SimbirSoft World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Employers often prefer to recruit experts for certain jobs, rather than a big team; senior and mid-level pros, as well as experienced developers, are always preferred in this situation. As a result, there has been a spike in demand for them.

However, given that tomorrow’s events are uncertain, is it important to recruit seniors? How can new projects be started and teams assembled when things are changing so quickly? If you’re asking yourself this, kudos to you! This means you are a capable manager who understands the hazards and considers options to reduce them. Konstantin Shakurov, head of analytics at the IT company SimbirSoft, offers his perspective on the matter.

What if you are too cautious, occasionally indecisive (this is only natural, though, as each choice might cost a substantial portion of the budget), and unsure of what to do with the project team moving forward? What if you are concerned that your rivals may be more concentrated on the task at hand while you are torn between numerous challenges? What if you want to focus on the primary activity that generates revenue and entrust the administration of the team to experts? Outsourcing is a remedy for that.

Just ten years ago, who would have considered letting a third party do their financial management? Today, though, it’s common for businesses to outsource their accounting needs. This also holds true for cleaning, catering, staff entertainment, design, copywriting, social media marketing, and other services. The same goes for IT, as more and more businesses are realizing that outsourcing everything not directly tied to their profile is the best course of action. Those who are good with money have no doubts that it is more efficient.

Some businesses continue to worry, nevertheless, that the outsourced staff will be less motivated and invested in the company’s affairs, that it will be hard to influence and manage, that the project idea or source materials may be stolen, etc.

The most common argument is that an internal team will be less expensive and that its members care more about the outcome. This, however, isn’t always the case.

Five “benefits” of internal teams that won’t help you much

Let’s look at five common arguments for shifting focus to internal experts at a challenging period for your business’s finances. Hopefully, the knowledge provided here will help you cut costs where possible.

1. “Hiring your own development team is not that hard”

Amid a crisis, organizations require expertise, and demand for mid- and senior-level pros rises. Thanks to the expertise of professionals who employ tried-and-true procedures, methods, and solutions, this lowers the costs of their training, boosts the work rate, minimizes errors, and provides a scaling effect.

However, such professionals are picky about their employers. They often wait for the best offer before accepting one. They have learned to maximize their own profit due to the rapid paycheck growth in IT. Head hunting also is a thing. Furthermore, it is frequently done by either industry giants or sizable businesses that cater to the public sector.

It might be challenging to find a highly qualified employee under these circumstances. A lot of your time and resources will be used up throughout the hunt. Once you’ve landed an expert, it’s crucial to retain him by offering suitable working conditions and the bonuses that were promised in the contract. All of this involves increased expenses. We’ll get to that later, however.

2. “Employees of your organization are consistently more driven towards success”

An in-house expert might pursue personal interests. He can generate his own KPIs, for instance, if they are based on the number of completed tasks. In a bid to have a larger budget, some increase their staff. Others wish to modify the project’s technological stack, aesthetics, or other aspects to fit their idea of how things should be.

When outsourcing, the business and the contractor have similar objectives. The client wants the project finished, while the contractor wants to execute it in line with the terms of reference and acceptance criteria, and both parties want to make money.

3. “It is simpler to manage your staff”

There are certain issues with time cost transparency for internal teams. In some organizations, employees may not accurately record how much time they spend on a task. When we explain the nature of our pipeline to candidates from such teams, we frequently hear the following response: “We don’t check the hours for tasks like that; we just jot down that we worked 8 hours, and that’s it. I think it will be very stressful, and I’m not ready for that.”

With the use of metrics and performance monitoring, the outsourced team is constantly compelled to increase its effectiveness. Any departure from the ideal process entails a danger to their reputation. Any hour is an administrative unit that cannot be idle. As a result, the outsourcer can always state that the customer profited from each hour the expert worked for them. As a consequence, the company enjoys the services of a contractor who carries out the work within the allocated budget and in accordance with predetermined approval criteria. With outsourcing, businesses may operate with greater transparency since it is always known how much will be spent, on what activities, and at which quality level.

Control is also necessary for internal projects. The product owner must still evaluate the criticality of the assigned task implementation, even if a full-time team is working on such tasks. Otherwise, without planning, task appraisals, and sprints, projects risk turning into black holes. One frequent example was recently brought up in the community: even the leaders in the finance tech industry occasionally get into circumstances where most of their code is completely unnecessary and development is moving far too slowly. As a result, the resource is idling, but the days go, and wages are paid.

4. “An internal team will guarantee the idea’s safety and ongoing development”

Here’s a story: A fintech company founded a startup with a promising product concept. The market was expanding, therefore they didn’t even look at the MVP. They assembled a group and went to town writing code. Although the product had not yet begun to generate revenue, investors had already expressed interest in it. Investments started to show up, and the team began expanding, as skilled experts were lured by the high wages. The development was going on successfully. However, the company’s lead developer made the decision to quit one day. Nobody anticipated that, and there was no updating of the documentation. As a consequence, the work halted and the expertise was lost along with him. In order to resume the normal development procedure, new initiatives and expenses will be needed.

100% in-house is always risky and necessitates careful consideration of documentation safety and regular updating. However, there are other potential issues here. The cost of replacing a highly specialized expert can run as low as 75% of a yearly wage for basic developers and as high as 200% for managers. An outsourced team will protect the company from these issues, guarantee the security, updating, and transfer of all documents and artifacts, and most importantly — the continued development. You may be confident in a fast time-to-market indicator in this situation.

An outsourcing company’s operations are based on maintaining ongoing development. Even if one of the experts leaves, a replacement will arrive right away. By then, he will have had a thorough onboarding, be fully engaged in the project, and no further “burn-in” time will be needed.

5. “Hiring a third-party contractor is less profitable than paying your team wages”

The IT industry has produced a specific Employee Experience (EX) that includes agile techniques, high compensation, innovative work, as well as financial and social perks that require expenses. And yet, despite this, there is still a significant degree of mobility among IT professionals, making it challenging to win an employee’s loyalty.

The primary factors in choosing an employer are a high income, benefits, and interesting projects. However, a good corporate culture, events, and internal process organization that promotes employee growth and professional development are required to create the right IT atmosphere (changing projects, training, etc.). All of this necessitates expensive resources and skills, which may not be available in businesses from non-IT sectors. Outsourcing and outstaffing will relieve your company of this burden. Only variable expenses will be incurred by you as the client, while internal costs are always fixed.

When doing work in-house, a company only has one performer — its own IT department, while outsourcing always lets you find a contractor who is more cost- and quality-efficient. As we previously stated, there is a possibility of staff bloating which might lower output and quality.

There is also a possibility of running into another issue amid economic uncertainty. If you are faced with the need to shut down an internal team’s ongoing IT project, they will have to be sacked. This entails risks, such as the possibility of attracting the attention of oversight agencies in the event that a sizable team is released. The benefit of outsourcing is that once the project is finished, the company does not have to worry about how to keep the professionals engaged.

As demonstrated by the experience of various businesses, the price-to-result ratio of in-house developers is poorer over time as a result of decreasing motivation, lower technical proficiency, and steadily rising wages. The likelihood of downtime, unrealistic expectations, and financial waste increases if a company’s operations are not designed to make every hour of an employee’s labor productive.

When should a company opt for an outsourced team?

Here are some circumstances when clients are prepared to outsource their projects:

• when implementation deadlines are tight;
• when an IT product needs a thorough examination, including a suitable methodology for project and development management, quality service, architecture, etc.;
• when there isn’t a fully functional IT department or experience carrying out relevant projects.

A company might waste a lot of time developing its IT department, structure, processes, etc., if it wants to cut costs. Meanwhile, time is more important than money for a business that values its customers. The customer also obtains process expertise and all of the contractor’s experience in addition to the team of professionals.

Outsourcing services always adds value since a business gains expertise, collected knowledge, and risk reduction. An experienced company is always aware of potential issues and understands how to mitigate them. For instance, we have a quality assurance service that keeps an eye on hazards and proactively works in the client’s best interests, mentors who can help an employee with a project if he runs into a wall, and architects who can design intricate systems. This means guaranteed problem solving for the client.

Every change must be done skillfully. Start by creating a hybrid setup, where the core will be your in-house expert group, and the reinforcements will come from trustworthy outsourcers. This will give you the best possible working structure.

Learn more about how to create an MVP app that is both convenient for users and easy for the team to develop: How to Make an MVP App That Everyone Will Love

Join our Medium community to keep up-to-date with our experts’ insights: Top 6 Business Tips to Avoid Mistakes in Product Development

Using Outsourcing to Survive in a Changing Economy was originally published in SimbirSoft World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We have identified three groups of criteria:

• business criteria: related to your business task;
• user criteria: based on communication with users;
• technical criteria: depends on the properties of mobile devices.

This separation allows you to take into account different aspects and not miss anything important when making a decision. The criteria will help you independently analyze the potential benefits of creating a mobile app and not waste resources on auditing your idea.

Business Criteria

You want to create an app for employees

Will the mobile solution facilitate or speed up business processes in the company? If the activity of employees is tied to working with a computer, and all face-to-face meetings do not require urgent recording in internal systems, then most likely not. In this case, you can:

• review the business process for certain tasks;
• use the capabilities of a corporate website: for example, create a widget;
• consider a bot option: it is suitable for informational messages (e.g, about birthdays) and simple operations.

You want to create an app for your clients

• You do not belong to Instant Commerce — a model where your business (or a single sales channel) is unthinkable without mobile technology. For example, the taxi or food delivery service.

You should not completely abandon the idea of ​​developing a mobile application, but for now it is better to focus on existing channels that bring profit. For example, continue to develop social networks and make a mobile layout for your website.

• You do not collect information about your customers — statistics and metrics.

The application will be useful if it is important for you to deeply understand your audience in order to develop your business: what materials encourage you to make a purchase, what features are used most often, etc.

User Criteria

• You decided to create an application for the target audience, but did not identify and check the problem.

To make sure that the app will solve a specific problem and you will not invest in vain, start the Discovery Phase — a preparatory stage before development and the first step from an abstract idea to the implementation of the plan.

• No interaction with users is needed: for example, you are not going to conduct various surveys, send them push notifications with reminders, post stories, etc.
• You do not need an individual approach to the user — you do not strive to form targeted offers and targeted services.

One of the advantages of the mobile app is the ability to build a customized recommender system. In this case content is tailored to the user experience: for example, suggestions for preferences or even an adaptive home screen (advanced level). But if you don’t aim at boosting sales in this way, then it is easier to expand the audience through other channels.

Technical Criteria

• You do not plan to use the technical capabilities of devices: camera, geolocation, barcode scanner, document recognizer, AR, etc.
• There is no need to work offline with the app.

Summing up

If you want to take your business to the next level and:

• capture new markets,
• move your business from offline to online,
• increase sales due to loyal users, etc.,

then analyze what you are missing now using the proposed criteria.

If you decide that you are ready to create an app and want to explore the possibility of its implementation deeply, contact us! Feel free to write to request@simbirsoft.com. We will offer the best solution!

Learn more about how to create an MVP app that is both convenient for users and easy for the team to develop: How to Make an MVP App That Everyone Will Love

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Does Your Business Really Need a Mobile App? was originally published in SimbirSoft World on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.