Sunbytes

BACKGROUND

Please describe your company and your position there.

As an external IT consultant I've been tasked with guiding the development of Online Dossier and newer version of the Electronic Patient documentation system for our customer Kwadraad. Kwadraad is a social work organisation providing social work guidance to people in over 40 municipalities in the sout-west of The Netherlands.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

For what projects/services did your company hire Sunbytes, and what were your goals?

Sunbytes has provided us with a team as a service where their developers where fluently integrated in our team to develop software in an agile way. When customers including Kwadraad would come up with requests this would be translated into epic's and user stories, given development weight and planned from the backlog if needed.

The developers would then proceed building those features and have them tested untill the point we can release them. This way we where able to do releases every day. Furthermore there was technical debt so we decided to build a complete new Online Dossier, where Sunbytes delivers UX/UI capacity for, architecture support and a multi disciplinary development team. All with people both in Vietnam as in The Netherlands.

SOLUTION

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

Offshoring work often finds its root in cost saving, availability of skills, focus of the team and flexibility of hiring people in another timezone. For Kwadraad all of these apply: where working with people that have 4 hours of work time before the Dutch working day started has added benefit in development and releasing software, every Vietnamese morning this could be easily done without interrupting business.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.

We're using several software development supporting tools, project management tools and agile scrum related tools to build a way of tracking work, planning work and gathering the needed information to have beautiful software build by our team in Vietnam. The Vietnamese side has it's own project manager that takes care of the planning over there and focusses on development excellence, showing the build speed and planned speed and delivers the overview of frontend and backend development points.

The new platform is fully containerized and build with latest development technologies.

How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

Company owner, project manager, quality manager, several level 1 to level 3 engineers and developers, depending of the project phase 4 to 10 people in total.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

We've been around 10% ahead of planned development points, that we could use to build special requests from customers.

Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.

Very open, consequent and complete. At any time I can easily see where we stand. The cultural differences are automatically solved due to the fact that Sunbytes is a Dutch-Vietnamese company. So you get a mixed style of focus and a can-do mentality and an open and honest approach to your project.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

They have relentlessly worked on our software. The working ethics are different then ours - we feel like we need to slow down things sometime more then having to ever push anyone.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

At the start we had to learn about Vietnamese culture while working with our team. Saying no is not something someone from many asian countries easily does. So having guidance in this aspect from the Dutch co-worked towards the Vietnamese team members proved helpful optimizing a realistic approach on planning and realism of our requests.