Tradio

Situation

Adellica, a small consulting company from Bergen, Norway, specializing in mobile and embedded solutions, was working on the mobile application which performs remote control of the radio equipment. While hardware development was performed by a separate team, Adellica was in charge of creating mobile software for TRadio. Adellica’s original goal was to reduce the product’s time to market by increasing the speed of the development process.

Solution

After analyzing the customer’s needs, Unicsoft suggested Adellica setting up a dedicated team of “rockstar” mobile developers in Ukraine. Adellica expected to hire a remote Android developer as soon as possible, and an iOS developer – within a couple of months. An important fact to consider was that the company’s management team consisted of two enthusiastic and talented programmers directly involved into the coding part of the project. They wished to continue working as programmers, but there was no formal PM in the team, and the corresponding tasks were shared between the leaders of the company.  For this reason, such personal qualities of the dedicated team, as self-organization, time management, priority-setting, appeared no less significant as the programming-specific skills.

Unicsoft found several senior Android and iOS profiles, based on the customer’s requirements and arranged the selection process introducing candidates and coordinating the assessment. Thanks to the intense joint effort of out HR team and the client company, both positions were filled within about 2 weeks after the request came in, and the right people, who seemed fully prepared for independent work on highly complex and long-running tasks, were found.

When the team was formed, the customers decided to visit Ukraine to live meet the developers and arrange a 4-day workshop for them to discuss the project in more detail and draft the upcoming tasks. Unicsoft took care of the administrative part of the meeting, bringing the developers and the customers to the office and arranging their working and leisure time in a comfortable way.

However, in some time it became obvious that the Android developer offered by Unicsoft was underperforming. At first we tried to address the problem with regular HR methods – by discussing and analyzing the problem and initiating the task-by-task project management. But keeping in mind the fact that the customers had no time and motivation to “micromanage” the team, we finally replaced the Android developer with a person who already had proven experience in independent work on medium-to-large-sized mobile projects.

Result

The project has lasted for about a year, and as of January 2015 it has reached finalization stage. Our Android and iOS developers took over a lot of macro-tasks and completed a large part of TRadio applications. Unicsoft, in turn, was responsible for HR and administrative support and appeared to effectively solve underperformance/replacement issues. Collaboration with Unicsoft and involvement of senior developers with high level of self-organization allowed the customer’s management team to focus on the development as they originally planned.