The customer is a sourcing company of food and non-food everyday goods for major retail companies in the Nordic countries.
In addition to supply, the customer concurrently develops private label products for about 13 million consumers. The range of the company's private label portfolio constitutes about 4,600 items available in more than 4,000 well-known and market-leading stores and online shops in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.
When the cooperation started in 2013, the companies agreed on a traditional approach to managing software development and maintenance processes. It included a fixed-price contract for maintenance, an RFC option and a classic Waterfall model for small-scale projects. In addition to supply, the customer concurrently develops private label products for about 13 million consumers. The range of the company's private label portfolio constitutes about 4,600 items available in more than 4,000 well-known and market-leading stores and online shops in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.
Since the customer is a fast-growing company accumulating more and more functions and projects, the business model approved earlier by both partners no longer meets their business needs. Hence, the parties mutually decided to modify business processes for improving large-scale project efficiency.
The customer used to take a traditional approach to manage software development and maintenance. It included a fixed-price contract for maintenance, an RFC option and a classic Waterfall model for small-scale projects. ICL Services offers the following solutions.
Key Challenges
- Making incident and change management simple and efficient for both the customer and ICL Services.
- Speeding up time to market.
- Improving end-user experience.
- Increasing business value through investments in IT solutions.
Solution
Implemented our solution
- ICL Services has been developing and maintaining the customer's corporate internal and external web applications since 2013. For today, ICL Services has developed over ten unique in-house applications for streamlining business operations. Both the customer's teams and its clients' employees across the globe use ICL Services applications.
ICL Services continuously modernises applications by leveraging latest technologies. Since 2016, ICL Services has fully renovated four business-critical applications.
ICL Services experts proposed to modify the existing framework in the following important ways:
- creating a centrally-based task management system with clear prioritising;
- ensuring simple and agile project management and maintenance processes;
- providing both employees and users with training aimed at a shift in their mindset.
Now the customer's product owners prioritise the backlog tasks before each coming sprint for the team to handle. It may be different tasks, for example, RFCs, user stories or non-urgent incidents. The team undertakes the backlog to complete them during this period.
All concerned parties can monitor each task status demonstrated on a digital whiteboard. For completing such urgent tasks as a high-priority incident, the product owner can revise a sprint backlog and move items back to the product backlog.
ICL Services has also adopted a new project management approach that excludes budgeting and task hours planning. Developers break down user stories into small tasks for providing high-level project forecasting. The new approach does not require task hours estimation and qualifies specific user requirements on request.
The new approach required development retooling, particularly SVN-to-Git migration and automated build & deploy in SharePoint on Jenkins CI server that enabled reuse items via Nuget package manager.
In addition, it was necessary to change the present contract to a more apt one. ICL Services and the customer opted for a T&M contract as a natural model for working in an agile way. Now users can get services from a dedicated development team handling all business tasks instead of buying each service separately.
Introduced modifications involve:
- ICL Services team and the customer can now work together via Scrum
- Developers selected from Russia and Denmark make a cohesive unit
- Implemented DevOps solutions help to ensure automative continuous delivery
- Streamlined development and day-to-day maintenance of complex projects go within a standard Scrum process
- The sides drew up a clear and transparent T&M contract for a dedicated DevOps team
Products and technologies
- C#/.NET, SharePoint, Angular,Azure DevOps, Jenkins, Nuget
Results
- Reduced project budget estimation time.
- 100% incidents solved.
- Improved Customer Satisfaction Index (VoC ranges between 4,5 and 5; a development team is equipped with a structured and coherent framework).
- Direct user interaction helped to enhance user satisfaction and loyalty and thus to develop new business streams.
- Once the changes were enforced, the company carried out a major IT project which gained a first-ever corporate reward and won the Project of the Year award.