Onboarding of new customer development team 100% virtual
20. April 2020
When a company chooses Conscensia as their partner to get a development team abroad, many tasks are initiated. The client tells about the project, how many developers they need, what competencies the developers must have, etc. We advise on the composition of the developers, the start-up phase, the ongoing collaboration and conduct a Cultural Intelligence workshop with the client, which prepares them for the collaboration.
When the team is recruited, most of our new clients choose to invite their new developers to their headquarter. Here they spend a few days together for knowledge transfer about the project they are going to work on. In addition to giving the developers an understanding of the domain, the product/project and the company, the visit also helps to build social capital.
When we sign on new developers, they always get an onboarding course at Conscensia, where they are introduced to our various internal policies, GDPR and IP rights. Of course, these introductory meetings were held virtually.
At the beginning of March, Conscensia and our new client were ready to start our collaboration. Flight tickets to the developers from Ukraine to Copenhagen were booked and the program in Denmark was timed and organized, when the covid19 pandemic put an end to travel activities. Therefore, the agenda was changed to a purely virtual onboarding, which required rapid reorganization and re-planning.
The first days were booked with exciting video meetings, where the project, development process and tasks were thoroughly reviewed. An introductory meeting was also held, in which the Ukrainian developers met with all relevant employees of the client, so that the developers quickly identified the various contact points in the company. Our new client has an open communication style, which optimizes the start-up phase, when questions are quickly answered. The open communication also helps the developers to learn and adopt the customer’s corporate culture faster.
After the introductory meetings, the real development work was quickly started. The development process is scrum based with daily morning scrum meetings of approx. 15 minutes with developers, product owner and relevant project managers participating. Now the collaboration has been going on for a month, and everyday life with scrum meetings and normal work is established.
We are proud that Conscensia organized and completed a virtual start-up phase with our new customer – with only a few days’ notice. Fortunately, we are used to collaborating virtually with our customers, so we have many efficient processes and a large toolbox.
