In many cases, the staffing tools do not have the appropriate level of usability and quality, end-users cannot do the required job due to security restrictions, vendors do not provide the necessary support, and users lack technical and design expertise.
The SoftServe team, in order to support the company’s strategy of growing by three times over the next three years, needed to accelerate its staffing process to:
- Hire as many as 30 candidates in a 4-week time period
- Assign candidates to external clients with a 99% certainty that the candidate would n ot move to another project
- Create a consistent corporate style for email notifications
- Dataway integration
- Manage company restructure
- Evaluate the hiring process
Project Description
In order to address the business challenges, the project consisted of several steps. First, to improve staffing process speeds the team analyzed application performance and reviewed the staffing process. As a result, the team identified a few critical areas on the application side where speed could be improved. Additionally, the staffing process review uncovered deep business process issues that were resolved by changing outdated rules.
A “lock” feature was developed to identify candidates with a high probability of being hired for a future job vacancy. The team conducted several negotiation sessions with the software development office to define payment rules. A code-refactoring procedure was put in place before each new development project to improve quality.
To resolve the corporate email style issue, a new notification system was developed within Outlook integration. A data sync service was also developed to achieve performance requirements and reduce data consistency issues. Additionally, a new system was developed to receive feedback from project managers on GTA team services.
Finally, to promote team performance the business analyst (BA) also assumed the roles of project manager (PM), technical leader, quality control leader, SCRUM master, and junior designer. Later the PM from the other team was involved as a technical leader.
To improve quality, the following activities were implemented:
- Small releases (up to 2 weeks)
- Code review, code convention, regression testing, identification of technical dependencies with the other tools
To improve usability, the following steps were added:
- BA prepared w ireframes
- UX engineer approved Wireframes
- End-users approved prototypes
Value Delivered
As a result of the project the
- End-users used the internal staffing tools and the staffing processes became more predictable.
- GTA team had a tool that improved the quality and efficiency of its work.
- The most critical technical debt issue was solved, which helped save the company.
- Company growth increased due to improved creditability with the client’s managers.