”Success is when the client doesn’t notice a difference”
1. October 2013
It is crucial for Pragmasoft to have their outsourced employees totally integrated with the Danish teams. This is why Conscensia’s vast experience in the field and consultancy about best practice became deciding factors in Pragmasoft choosing Conscensia as their sourcing partner.
Pragmasoft has been growing since the beginning of 2005, so when the IT development company started discussing outsourcing, it wasn’t based on wanting to save on salary costs. It was more based on a curiosity about whether outsourcing could be an effective way of getting the right competences onto the team.
“We could see that many of our competitors started doing it, so that is why the thought came to us, too. But we are not like most others – we have many clients, and many different types of projects, so we don’t have something to just pass on to a third party. That is why we wanted to find a sourcing partner who could deliver some developing forces to become an integrated part of the Danish teams that we have,” says managing director Vibeke D. Hansen about the reason for choosing Conscensia.
Skilled developers
For now, Pragmasoft has hired two Ukrainian developers through Conscensia. Pragmasoft views the first year of the collaboration as a pilot project that is to determine whether the company wants to focus on outsourcing in the future.
“We are not counting on any big profit in our calculations for the first year. It will probably end up with a profit after all, but that is not the most important thing to us. This is about testing whether it could work in our way of running teams,” says Vibeke D. Hansen who has also defined the criteria for success:
“Both we and the Ukrainian employees must feel like they have become an integrated part of the team, while our clients should not be able to see a difference in whether their business is dealt with in Denmark or Ukraine.”
The collaboration started in April 2013, and the first jobs have been done.
“It has gone really well, and easier than we had imagined. They are talented and fully on the same level as the Danish IT developers,” says Vibeke D. Hansen, who doesn’t see outsourcing as a fundamental change in the organisation of Pragmasoft.
“It is important to us that we are not changing our way of running our business. We have simply hired some new employees, and the fact that they are located in Ukraine is not of importance,” she says.
“We were very happy with the cultural workshop that Conscensia insisted on us having in the start-up phase. It presented the opportunity to ask questions, and it opened up for us being able to talk about possible differences across the borders, without us feeling like we had to approach any taboos sideways.
It also meant that we were well prepared when our Ukrainian employees came to Denmark to get to know our company, and it has actually turned out that we are not all that different when it comes to it, after all.”
– Vibeke D. Hansen, managing director of Pragmasoft
Facts about Pragmasoft:
Pragmasoft is an IT development company with its base in Aarhus. The name Pragmasoft is a contraction of ‘pragmatic software’, and covers the company’s focus on applicability and commercial value.
Pragmasoft was established in 2005, and today counts 30 employees.
