7Things sp. z o.o.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the deputy CTO of a financial company. It’s a public sector company responsible for printing banknotes, issuing documents like passports and IDs, and supporting students with IT systems.

What challenge were you trying to address with 7Things sp. z o.o.?

7Things held workshops for us about the payment standards introduced some time ago into European legislation. Some of our systems process payment data, and we wanted to continuously increase our knowledge in this area.

What was the scope of their involvement?

7Things conducted two online workshops with us around EU directive PSD 2. I had an initial call with their representative to talk a bit about our business and needs. They created two sessions, one directed to more technical people and the other for business stakeholders.

Their team prepared materials, which I had a chance to review before the webinars. Konrad (Head of Business) did the presentation, talking about the directive itself. We had the workshops online because of the coronavirus situation.

What is the team composition?

We had a single point of contact at 7Things. The two of us had a chance to talk to each other about 2–3 times before the workshops.

How did you come to work with 7Things sp. z o.o.?

It was through a personal contact. I’d had a chance to work with one of their employees at a previous company. I got in touch with them about a webinar, because our employees are working remotely at the moment, and our educational budget makes it impossible to send people to regular trainings.

How much have you invested with them?

It was a couple of thousand Polish złoty.

What is the status of this engagement?

We worked with them from March–April 2020.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The workshops were more focused on gathering information. We’ve started a new IT project and will hopefully utilize consumer parts of this knowledge. The project itself will last several months, so I don’t have any success stories at the moment. I’m hoping to have one in the near future.

How did 7Things sp. z o.o. perform from a project management standpoint?

I’m a certified project manager, so I have expertise in this. I’m very happy with the collaboration. The first thing that was created was a plan for delivering those workshops. We agreed on the goal, form, and time of the lectures.

It wasn’t a dry run but more of a review of the materials, looking at whether they really fit our needs, and whether the content was relevant to the audience of the lectures. Everything was planned and executed correctly, and I’m very happy.

What did you find most impressive about them?

I’m not an expert in this area but I was really surprised by 7Things’ knowledge around small details. They seemed to know the whole legislation, not only the theoretical parts but also in terms of practical implementation. It’s clear they’ve had a chance to implement it with their other customers.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There’s nothing here, really. We had another session after the webinars to summarize the whole project. 7Things asked us for feedback on their work.

Do you have any advice for future clients of theirs?

I was very happy working with them, and my only recommendation is for clients to open up their business cards a bit so 7Things can analyze their needs and propose things that may not be visible to the company itself. An expert can give us solutions that we may not even know about because we don’t have deep knowledge in that area. That’s something I liked about 7Things.