Our relationship to work is evolving, and a new model of flexibility seems to be the next step in our industry. However, the challenges that bring, as well as the human side of the story, need to be at the forefront.
By Scio Team
Untangling how deeply our life changed during the Covid-19 pandemic will take a long time, and while we are still dealing with much of its aftermath, the process of planning the future doesn’t stop, even if we aren’t quite sure of what’s next for the industry.
Because, undoubtedly, one of the deepest impacts was in the way we worked; our entire model of collaboration was based around in-person contact, to such a degree that a world without face-to-face interactions was unimaginable. After all, what happens when a member of an organization doesn’t have true contact with other people?
Every industry since 2020 has had to grapple with that question daily, to the point that the idea of “work” may look completely different from now on. And even if we understood, from a technical standpoint, that working remotely all the time is 100% possible, the human side of it had a cost.
“The pandemic didn’t erase the need for human connection, and I think some kind of rebound is due to happen”, says Luis Aburto, CEO, and Co-Founder of Scio, about the future of work in the software industry. “We experimented with the freedom of a full-time remote position, but when every interaction is digitally mediated, you inevitably feel something is missing.”
And this missing element is going to shape a lot of the future of the industry, as the biggest challenge of collaborating remotely, be it from home or another country, will be managing remotely the cohesion between the members of a team, an issue that looms over every workplace strategy rising from the pandemic.
The best of both worlds
A solution, however, might be here: the “hybrid” model of working, a mix of in-person presence and home office work that seems to strike the balance between the needs of the job and the preference of an individual.
“Although right now full remote work is the preferred model for many people in the tech industry, I believe that things are going to shift soon, as more of us start feeling the weight of the isolation that it builds up. After all, work can be more than just the means to make a living, it can also allow you to be part of something together, a community”, continues Luis Aburto. “The real challenge of transitioning to an effective hybrid model will be to promote and maintain this feeling of community and belonging.”
After all, the effect of prolonged isolation in the workplace has been well documented since the pandemic began in 2020. Although remote work did a lot to keep us safe, it wasn’t a shift without downsides: the lack of structure, the blurred lines between the personal and professional life, and the stressful fluctuations in productivity (be it underperforming due to distractions, or overperforming due to a lack of feedback) showed us that in-person collaboration was full of hidden benefits that only became clear when taken from us.
“Being physically at the same place creates opportunities to develop your skills, get ideas about where to push your career path, and discover what you like professionally. And even in casual encounters, where personal rapport can develop, you inevitably feel part of a group because people always need deeper human connections”, continues Luis. “At home, even if you go to a Starbucks, you don’t have any links with your coworkers, which is isolating.”
With this in mind, and adding all the benefits that remote work has for a business, like reduced operational costs, improved retention rate, and a bigger talent pool to draw from, the compromise of hybrid work seems to be the best solution. But what are the challenges it brings?
The challenge of hybrid models
The numbers provided by the Future of Work survey, as reported by Forbes paint a serious picture. Even if a hybrid model of work becomes the new normal, many issues need to be solved to implement it successfully. For example, according to the article, “the vast majority of businesses lack a detailed hybrid work strategy: 72% lack a detailed strategy and 76% don’t have the right key performance indicators (KPIs) to support hybrid working models.”
This is to say, that the leadership and management of any organization looking to implement this model need a clear strategy to build a culture remotely, be it through technology or the implementation of special measures. Helena Matamoros, Human Capital Manager at Scio, points out the strategy we have been implementing during the pandemic to keep our culture intact, making sure every new collaborator feels at home from day 1.
“We start with a Welcome Kit to make them feel part of Scio, and then we ensure they have everything they need to do their jobs comfortably. Beyond that, when our hybrid work model starts (for now, we are still 100% remote), we want to ensure that every leisure activity we do, like our Game Nights, can accommodate both face-to-face and remote collaborators.”
These activities have two purposes: one, allow new collaborators the opportunity to meet their coworkers and teammates, integrating them more easily at Scio, and two, give them the chance to play, share, and generally mingle about outside of a project, which is also why we encourage our Project Leader to organize their own activities, forming a better relationship in the team.
These are some of the measures we have implemented successfully at Scio, even if the real test of hybrid work is about to begin. However, as we already have a home office policy before the pandemic (when many of our collaborators could choose a day of the week to work away from the office), and we have employed talent from all over LATAM, we know that this challenge is not insurmountable.
Keeping the human connection going will be key. Even if we no longer want to be beholden to an office 40 hours a week or more without any flexibility, our relationship with work is changing, and as a society, it’s good we are experimenting with different ways to get things done. And it seems likely that the lion’s share of people in our industry will prefer the option to work from home for two or three days, and go to the office the rest of the week to not leave behind this source of connection.
“A lot of people tie professional relationships with negative feelings, thanks to overly-demanding leaderships that only know how to push, so we try to create a positive environment at Scio, aiming for the kind of positive experiences that enrich everyone equally, making everyone feel appreciated, heard and with the chance to grow”, states Luis Aburto, emphasizing that a good environment will be critical.
“Otherwise, the most valuable people are bound to find somewhere else to satisfy their professional and human needs, and if your organization doesn’t encourage different approaches, be it connection, flexibility, or culture to call their own, these people are bound to find a better opportunity elsewhere, and then you, as a business, is going to be left behind in obscurity.”
The Key Takeaways
The future of work is a hybrid model where people are able to work remotely. This trend is only going to become more permanent as time goes on, so companies would be wise to accept it and even implement it themselves. However, there are many challenges that come with this new way of working, the biggest one being culture. How can you make sure your organizational cohesion doesn’t suffer? That’s still an unanswered question, but it’s one that we should all start thinking about. What do you think of the hybrid work model? Let us know in the comments!
When we think about the landscape of software development, it’s easy to fall into a binary view: people either work at a tech start-up, with the allure of innovation and cutting edge technology, or they work with a corporation like Google, Microsoft, or Amazon that promises stability and long term rewards in exchange for creating products with a more incremental and risk-averse pace.
There’s plenty of content about what it is like to work in both kinds of organizations, with lots of writing devoted to discussing the virtues and drawbacks of each, but are those the only two options in software development? What happens with mid-sized software companies, and in which ways do they distinguish themselves from either start-ups or big companies?
Outputs and outcomes
Let’s try and define the actual differences between these three types of companies, specifically in regards to how they view and measure product development objectives. After all, a software organization can be defined by the outcomes they want to achieve, and the outputs they decide to focus on to reach them. But what do these terms mean? In the words of Kirstie Magowan, from the BMC Blog:
The outcomes are what the business wants or need to achieve.
The outputs are the actions or items that contribute to achieving it.
Or in other words, “outcomes are the results, and outputs are the activities that support the desired results”, and clarity of purpose for both of them defines what a given organization focuses on to develop the best possible products.
So, within product development for software companies, outcomes are things like new version releases, new features implemented for the users, faster development cycles, improved quality, etc. On the other hand, outputs are things like software requirements/user story documentation, UI/UX prototypes, code, database scripts, test cases, DevOps scripts, and so on.
However, some nuance needs to come into play at this point since we can imagine that organizations of different sizes and maturity cannot all seek the same outcomes. We’ll explore it in more detail, but in our experience, the main force that drives start-ups, mid-sized companies, and big corporations is that their target user bases have different expectations of their respective products.
The weight of expectations in development
“The top desired outcome for a start-up development team, working on the early stages of a new product, is to build an MVP as fast as possible so the company can launch it and attract enough early adopters to keep iterating an idea”, says Luis Aburto, CEO, and Co-Founder of Scio, about his experience working with companies of all sizes. “At this point, you have a ‘forgiving’ attitude among the user base if the product shows enough potential. Early adopters will frequently overlook some issues if the value they get in return is enough and the product has a clear roadmap of features and functionalities that will improve the final version in the future.”
So the challenge for a start-up is to iterate a product fast enough to establish itself before interest dries up. After all, if we define a start-up as “a temporary organization designed to look for a business model that is repeatable and scalable”, the push for innovation is always running against time, looking to please early adopters enough so the product gets accepted in the mainstream. That way, you get organizations more willing to bend the rules, avoid the bureaucracy that comes with very defined processes, and overlook some production requirements (like documentation) if the team is small and their output is focused on delivering a product.
“In contrast,for a big company”, Luis continues, “every time you implement a new feature, you have an opportunity to either delight your users or cause a catastrophe. Suppose you are an organization that has maintained a product for 10 or 15 years. In that case, there are a lot of dependencies and expectations that come along with that, and if you are not careful, test everything closely, and research your market fully, you can end up in a position where you can damage your clients and users. What if they depended on certain features or functionality for their jobs, or had important data stored inside the product? The outcomes here would look very different, as the “forgivingness” of your user base gets lower the more mainstream it is.”
These expectations, then, dictate the best outcome for a given organization, and in turn, these outcomes will dictate the outputs needed to achieve the goal. However, the unique challenge here is that, while outputs can be defined and measured easily, the outcomes seek to “change a behavior in the user”, which is a much more subjective and nebulous goal. To this end, Natalie Diggings, of OpenView Partners, proposes a set of questions to evaluate the performance of any given team with an outcome-focused mindset that can help engineering teams and management alike to keep their goals aligned:
Are you delivering value for the customer?
Are you delivering results each quarter that will help grow the business?
Are you mitigating risk?
Do you know the ROI of the features you’re building?
Did you ship when you said you would ship?
“What we try to do at Scio, by implementing the Agile methodologies in every project we work on, is to establish a minimum of processes and continuous communication to ensure the output our team contributes to the desired outcome for the product, avoiding misaligned expectations and other issues”, continues Luis about Scio’s experiences working with start-ups. “And for a big company, we try and secure a seamless on-boarding of our developers, as these organizations have clear and defined processes that we like to follow to a T to fulfill these same expectations.”
Mid-sized companies: Hitting the sweet spot.
However, Scio’s area of expertise is a segment of the software development industry that doesn’t seem to have that much attention directed at the mid-sized range of companies that hit the balance between a start-up and a big corporation, which has some unique benefits worth exploring.
For example, if we go back to expectations, outputs, and outcomes, an organization of around 50 to 100 people is still guided and directed by the vision of its founders, which seems to bring some advantages that balance out the issues of the other two types of companies.
“Working with a big, Microsoft-like corporation seems like a no-brainer, but at that size, and the bureaucracy that comes along with it, there’s a very limited impact you can have in a given project. But with a medium-sized organization, where you still have the opportunity to work directly with the founders and share and understand their vision, alongside an organization still looking towards the same clear goals, collaboration becomes a more personal matter. Is a business with a human element still felt”, Luis concluded.
These kinds of connections are important when you look for a partner to help you reach a specific outcome, as a “clarity of purpose” can still be shared among the development teams, executives, and product owners, with the benefit of the structure, processes, and methods of a mature organization. After all, before hitting the “millions of users” metric, a mid-sized company still has the chance to push innovation forward with minimal risk.
This is also another big difference between these three kinds of organizations; for a start-up, risk in pursuit of innovation is the name of the game, and for a big corporation, incremental improvement with stable growth is the norm. Having an approach that can still make use of both perspectives is what makes working with these companies so interesting.
“On the business side, a mid-sized organization still looks to grow, but the relationship with their users and clients still has a personal touch, with support and communication at a human level, which allows them to get new clients more easily while still maintaining their current ones. And in the development size, the cohesion between collaborators, both in-house and outsourced, still has a clarity of purpose in their outputs.This is the way Scio functions, and also why we like to offer their support to mid-sized companies; our communication, collaboration, and goals always come hand in hand during a project. With this, the best outcomes are more measurable, reachable, and all in all, understandable”, concludes Luis.
The Key Takeaways:
An outcome is defined by the expectations of the clients of a given company, which should be taken into account in every development cycle.
Clarity of purpose is critical; if your dev team doesn’t know where their work is pointed towards, then it’s difficult for the output to match the outcome, which can vary heavily depending on the age and size of the organization.
Companies of different sizes have different strengths and weaknesses, but a mid-size company can have the best of both worlds: the processes necessary for a project to succeed, while still maintaining cohesion among its collaborators.
The personal relationships that can grow during collaboration are important for the outcome of a project, as they make it easier for a team of collaborators to share a vision and purpose in their outputs.
It’s easy to see the idea of success as a default goal, something everyone should be looking for in any endeavor they start. And while it’s true that always looking for a specific destination is part of our nature, what does success mean? Because when we talk about success, it’s easy to forget that it never looks the same for everyone.
Truth is, success comes from a very personal place for most people, where our experiences and expectations shape the way we work and collaborate, and the specific things we choose to focus on. That’s why at Scio we believe that a good organization leaves enough space to let every collaborator reach success on their terms. So what is a success, then? As we were curious about what drives each of our developers and engineers, we sent a survey to all the Scioneers to ask this very important question: what does success look like to you?
The importance of balance
“Success is feeling in control of my personal life”, states one of the responses we got. “Being able to feel like I’m doing something valuable, having the strength and motivation to continue doing the things I love, and also being happy with the ones around me.” This image of success, for example, points out the important balance between work and personal life, one of the core values of Scio regarding their collaborators. We consider this is an important topic because developing software is as much of a creative endeavor as a technical one, and having people who keep healthy boundaries is crucial to always arrive at the best outcomes. To this end, fostering a good culture of collaboration and camaraderie is the best approach to ensure that a project is completed successfully, as it can also mean that your work doesn’t go unnoticed. “I like that Scio’s culture promotes the gesture of congratulating the team, both individually and as a whole”, says another of the answers we got. “I like the post-mortem charts we have about our successful projects, where they make sure all the team knows we are aware of their achievements. We even have social meetings to celebrate successful goals, which I think it’s a good idea. So let’s continue promoting the gesture of congratulating our teams for their achievements.” This is one of the examples of the ways Scio tries to maintain mutual support in everything we do, and something as simple as notifying everyone that a team has achieved a goal, or having a group call to just chat and relax, goes a long way toward it.
Success beyond the office
However, for some, success transcends the workplace and instead focuses on how it affects a collaborator’s everyday life. “Having my own home, seeing my kids happy, and maybe even running a marathon in another country is success” was one of the answers we got, as well as “Feeling full, and having yourself, your family, your significant other, your mind, your work, and your world in balance” and “Being able to do what I like in life and enjoy every second.”
This topic keeps coming out because a clear balance between work and personal life has been increasingly desired among both developers and companies starting to embrace the advantages of remote work and hybrid collaboration models, so making sure a healthy equilibrium exists is one of our core values here at Scio. “Feeling happy and comfortable with where you are”, another one of our responses, sums it up very well.
We understand that, due to the nature of software development, sometimes keeping this balance is tricky, even if Nearshore companies like Scio offer plenty of flexibility and options to work, so taking the steps to ensure that our collaborators can define success beyond the needs of a project goes a long way.
This also ties with another concept that many developers find attractive in any workplace: the chance to learn and grow as they work, which seemed to be a focal point in many of the answers we received. “Meeting the objectives and goals, keep the things I learned, as well as learning from the mistakes to improve”, and “Creating something of value that has a positive impact on the people you care about” get to the point of it, as a successful person might also be one that learns, grows and creates useful things from the work they do.
“Looks like having a clean conscience, lots of self-caring, not reserving everything to myself, feeling useful, achieving a wisdom state” was an unexpected answer. A lot of people can see success in purely personal terms (i.e. “how I feel about this thing I did?), so creating an environment where collaboration and personal growth are on the same frequency tends to deliver the best outcomes.
The success of living well
And last, it’s not a secret that many go into software development because it’s a very in-demand field with lots of organizations to choose from to collaborate with, and compensation is always important for anyone looking to join an organization that shares their values. “For me, is to be financially stable enough to give my family a better life, while also being happy in your job and what you like. To be successful is also to be recognized in your work and know that you are an important part of your company”, reads one of the answers, highlighting success as having the means to support your loved ones while also working on something you feel passionate about.
“For me, success is when your lifestyle and quality of life improves significantly and money isn’t an issue at all”, continues another of the responses. “While also achieving your personal and professional goals, feeling full and happy. Then you have a balance of these ‘pillars’ and yet you are further away from where you started.”
As we reveal more responses, we can start to see that “success” is, at the end of it, directing your life in the way you want to, down to every detail, as this answer manages to explain beautifully: “For me, success has many shapes. From small achievements to the greatest goals, success can happen anywhere, in any place, both in our personal and professional lives, in the financial sense, or even with the people around you”, trying to get across how success is present in our daily lives.
“Even in defeat, we can see success in learning something, feeling good about it, making ourselves proud, and gaining more knowledge in return. If we see it like this, anything we achieve is a success.”
So what do you think? How do you personally define success and how does it get reflected in your personal life? Is it something concrete you work towards every day, or a state of life you want to achieve? Because no matter what your definition of success is, at Scio, we are willing to lend you a hand and achieve your best possible outcome.
“Are you an office person, or a home person?” might have been a weird question to ask in a job interview a couple of years ago, but as our relationship with jobs evolves, we begin to understand the different ways people see work, which have an immense weight in the ways we relate and engage with a particular organization.
Let’s think back for a second and ask ourselves: since the pandemic began, what was the biggest difference we felt working from home? It’s not difficult to imagine that everyone had a different reaction to this change: some found themselves missing the interactions of the office, while others found that working from home was an ideal arrangement, and a third group looked for a middle ground working at the office some days, and from home the others. So the question is: do you have a preference? Does that impact your work?
“The equilibrium between productivity and presence is one of the hardest to master in business”, mentions this Forbes article analyzing this situation. “We often think of ourselves separate from the environment, the system, the culture, the work. In reality, there is very deep interconnectedness to our being.”
In other words, the environment in which we collaborate affects the results we have and is clear that people, as individuals, have personal preferences in the ways they work. And if that conclusion might seem obvious, it seemed to need the upheaval of a pandemic for many companies to start harnessing this newfound approach.
“It’s a shift away from the one-size-fits-all approach of the past, where the work is designed (complete with open-plan offices, fluoro-lighting, 9:00 am starts and a five-day workweek) and then people are squeezed into it”, says an article published by the news network ABC. “But one size never really fits all.”
This gives us an idea: is it possible to ensure that a collaborator can have more control over the conditions of their work? Yes, and it’s becoming a topic of discussion everywhere, especially in Tech, where disruption of the status quo is the name of the game: Hyperpersonalization.
The rise of Hyperpersonalization
How do you prefer to work? Where? When? Why? Everyone has a different answer to these questions, so collaborating in an environment that takes them into account makes all the difference in our productivity. In software development, for example, this was already a trend before the pandemic, with things like having the option to work from home one day a week or offering different hours depending on personal preference becoming normal.
However, the pandemic came to be one of the final blows at our traditional “office hours”, with a big percentage of people discovering ways to work that they really couldn’t consider before, changing the way many organizations collaborate with employees.
“In the past, workplace strategists were able to assign flexible working ratios based on a team and its primary functions. With the mass-scale adoption of hybrid working, the preferences of employees coming into the office have become hyper-personalized. We can no longer assume an employee or team will be in on specific days due to their job function or demographic”, indicates the blog The Pulse about this trend.
And it’s easy to see how these circumstances might define the outcome of any given project. After all, are your most productive times the same as everybody else’s? Is your home the best place to get things done? Or do you like to be at home, but also have the option of an office for important meetings or access to better infrastructure if you need it?
“Hyper personalization is usually associated with marketing products and services to individual consumers — think about how Netflix builds up a profile of what you like to watch and uses that to suggest content to you or the way Spotify serves up new songs based on what you’ve listened to before — but it can also be applied to the workplace”, continues the ABC article about the topic. “The pandemic gave many workers a chance to dip a toe into the hyper-personalization waters.”
However, what does hyper-personalization actually look like in action? Because we must keep in mind that this concept encompasses lots of different elements, ones that go from the business you are working from, to the individual interests and affinities of each developer and collaborator.
“I’ve been part of some very long projects”, says Carlos Estrada, one of the Lead Developers at Scio. “And one time, after six or seven years with the same client, I told Rodimiro [Scio’s Service Delivery Manager and Co-Founder] that I just felt in a rut, doing the same thing every day. He understood and said he had a couple of projects I could help with during my “dead” hours at Scio. I liked that openness, and it helped me explore other types of tasks that I was interested in.”
As this anecdote shows, “hyper-personalization” doesn’t have to be a complete upheaval in a company; just being listened to and working with an organization open to making changes by offering options for different types of people, can go a long way. To this end, that same ABC article we quoted earlier gives us some questions to consider and discuss hyper-personalization, and define where you want to direct your career:
When and how do you work your best, and in what environment
What you find engaging and meaningful
Where your strengths lie
The ideal place of work and your desired mix of responsibilities
For example, while Scio is a Nearshore company with developers all over Latin America, which are permanent remote collaborators, for those locally in Morelia we plan to implement a “hybrid” model of work, where the week is divided between home and office days. Also, we offer different start and finishing times, in case you prefer something different than the traditional 9 to 6, and three days of PTO in case you need to take time off for any personal reason, among other options aimed at our collaborators as individuals who have different affinities and preferences.
“When it comes to creating the right culture of an organization and/or building an attractive brand, the question actually becomes how do we rethink our existence, policies, and structures so that it can reflect (as authentically as possible) some of our deepest values, ways of connecting and working?”, concludes Forbes.
And this last question is at the heart of it: the ways we connect as individuals with our jobs matter, so choosing an organization that understands, respects, and tries to implement measures to give collaborators some freedom to work as they see fit is invaluable to foster a healthy, engaged culture.
There are a lot of opinions about the best possible way of measuring productivity, but that can bring us to another question entirely: why measure it at all? In this second part of our interview with Adolfo Cruz, we dig into the reasons why measuring productivity is important for any organization.
By Scio Team
If you are adding value for a client during a product’s development, creating something they can use to attract more users or increase their profits, you may say the time invested in the process was productive, but how do you measure that? Can it be done?
Productivity can be witnessed, it happens right in front of you when a team is making progress, but translating that into data is not an easy task; it takes a lot of time and effort to get right, and it might take focus away from the resulting product, ironically affecting your productivity.
It’s similar to that quantum physics phenomenon where you could change the outcome of something by observing it; all the effort invested in getting exact numbers to measure productivity could make you neglect stuff that has value for the product developed, so you need to be very careful in how you implement measurements to not interfere.
So this begs a very important question: why measure productivity at all? You can see people in the software industry questioning that, going as far as suggesting it’s unnecessary, but we disagree. At Scio, we want to know if our engineers are offering real value to our clients, which is very important to us even if sometimes we use subjective, case-by-case measures to do so.
Measurements impact the way products are being developed
Reaching a standard that applies to everyone is complicated, and if you add the fact that some people may be working on different projects and products at the same time, with different challenges and rhythms, you get variables that complicate things further, so we guide ourselves by the idea of “We are productive if we add value to a business”. It’s a given that achieving working software is delivering promises, so it’s more about how a client feels about the products you are making.
The problem is trying to approach this with objectivity, but doling out numbers can have unintentional consequences; developers can over-focus on raising their numbers because the important metric seems to be proving your value with high stats, so it ceases to be a team and instead is just a collection of people making their figures go up. Metrics can bring improvements, but you also need to consider their context to make them helpful, which is why it’s difficult to find a universal solution to measure productivity in software development.
When we are in charge of managing a project, productivity is more focused on avoiding red flags instead of checking who is less productive in any given team, measuring it to avoid deviating too much from our goals; it’s easy to fall from a cliff if you aren’t careful with that. We are not interested in using metrics to know if everyone is achieving some arbitrary standard, but rather steering a ship, looking at the productivity of the team as a whole.
To this end, it’s useful to register the progress of every project and map them out to find general trends rather than trying to get exact figures. Robert D. Austin, the author of the book Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, said that unless you can measure 100% of something, there’s no point to measure anything at all, but in most cases, you don’t need to have every single data point, just an educated guess about where the project is heading, helped with some metrics that give a clear perspective.
This can be seen in the sprints. With information about how many story points (the metric used to estimate the difficulty of implementing a given improvement) are completed, how many issues surface, how many are solved, and comparing it with past efforts, the red flags are obvious. If the team completed between 5 and 10 story points in a sprint, but only 1 or 2 the next one, you need to dig into the process; you might find some challenges nobody saw coming and had to be solved to move forward, and you didn’t need more than knowing past productivity to compare.
And often, if you are using Agile Methodologies, the team is the one that realizes when someone is struggling or is free to help and correct the issues themselves. A good team can manage itself, keeping productivity up without needing someone to check their progress daily. This also results in the quality of the product being directly embedded into the productivity of the process, as the team should already know at this point what needs to be measured to plan with the amount of flexibility necessary to succeed.
We help your team deliver more value to the business.
In software development, we could measure how many Final Users are aware of a specific feature, how many support tickets are being sent, how many things are misunderstood, or which things are not working as intended, converting it into data to know if there are issues during development, but you still need to take some subjective measurements, like conversations with the clients to know how they feel about the product, to give context to this information.
That’s the impact we want to have on our clients, and more often than not, they start seeing the benefits of these processes. They take the time to plan their sprints, properly assess the project, and address issues, especially with not very experienced clients, whom we show what a good software development cycle looks like.
After all, developing software is closer to creating art than manufacturing an object, so the question of productivity is similar. Just like writing a novel, it’s hard to estimate exactly how long each step is going to take because human beings are bad at estimating time and effort in the long run.
We take the time to understand your business and create custom software that helps you grow.
As we know how quickly things can change in a short amount of time, Scio typically plans short-term goals (between 1 – 3 months) and mid-term goals (between 6 – 12 months) at most when we work with our clients during the evolution of the product, in order to ensure it has enough room to grow naturally, focusing on the steps we need to reach a desirable outcome, and even then it’s a challenge to keep every detail under control. There have been occasions where we have to overhaul plans to finish a project in the timeframe we set, and in those situations, the final product is different from how we first envisioned it because of the natural evolution that a project goes through.
So planning way too into the future is highly risky, shorter steps with a clear idea of every milestone is a method that has shown us the best results to develop a product, which is one of the principles of the Scrum methodology; working with iterations that have defined starting and ending points, and progress is registered at every step.
And even then you can get slightly different results every time. Sometimes a team is very well attuned and can build things faster than a team mostly composed of new developers, or engineers who had never worked together before, so obviously they took a little longer, which is why Scio evolved to focus more on the value we are delivering to our clients, involving them more in the process, deciding together which features were more valuable, and the priorities to establish.
After all, always having the option to say “Okay, let’s stop for a bit, reorganize, plan better retrospectives, and find areas of improvement” depends on knowing your process back and forth, and that’s why measuring productivity is important.
Measuring productivity is hard, but it’s not impossible. It takes some general metrics and subjective questions dictated by human behavior that are never objective. That’s where Scio comes in – we design teams that fit with the culture and practices of our clients, ensuring that no matter what, we always have the necessary perspective to achieve a successful engagement. If you want help measuring your engineering team’s productivity or just need someone to bounce ideas off of, send us a message. We love talking about this stuff!
