Category: Blog

Employee training investments you can ensure your future success. Effective training made specifically for your team can provide them with essential skills. In IT, technologies change very fast. Lots of tools are introduced every day, so the existing employees would want to work with new technologies. Yet, it is hard to invest time and money in training.

Here are 4 reasons why you should invest in training your team and get them to adapt to the industry and competition:

Training increases the value of your technology department

Usually, employees enjoy the idea of “a training opportunity”. They know that this set of skills is going to help them to solve challenges and actively combat issues within your company. Encourage your employees to stay tuned with new IT trends, allow them training in these technologies and increase the value of your team

Training increases client satisfaction

Besides the technical skills, an employee also needs soft skills. Communicating, being a team player or having a critical behavior in different situations, management and leadership skills, all these competencies ensuring a good relationship between your employees and the customers are just as important as the technical skills. In order to find out if your team has this set of skills, you can use performance evaluations and carry on with specific training, if needed.

Training increases the strategic and innovative thinking

Usually, an experienced employee is more confident and can be more strategic and innovative when facing the customers’ needs. Bringing improvements in innovation competencies it’s a difficult process. You have to find challenging activities that activate the creativity, which is the foundation of innovation.

A satisfied employee is a productive and a reliable employee

Every company who invests in employee development shows professionalism in meeting business goals. A productive team completes the work in a shorter period of time, keeping a good quality of the tasks. Training can initiate a positive bond between your team and your company. This might be a good thing if one of your top priorities is to have a powerful team of professionals.

Training is expensive, but these costs pale when your business starts to grow. Develop skills in order to increase efficiency and make your team feel empowered.

It is true that in today’s IT market is hard to keep up with all the changes. Implementing ideas and meeting experiences that both reflect an international culture, you can offer a fresh perspective on all the new issues or topics. By the way, outsourcing companies need a strong international culture in order to adapt to the client needs.

Communication and feedback are two of the most important skills in outsourcing and offshore businesses. Without them, all sorts of breakdowns can occur and it takes time and resources to fix things. In order to make your business successful, you should allow your team to be flexible when there is a strong know-how in every working area.

With a great poll of youngsters graduating from Computer Science and Informatics each year, Cluj Napoca is a great place to recruit talents for the IT industry.

After hosting internships at my company, for more than 10 years, I must say that in Romania we really have well prepared and smart students in the technical field. But when it comes to presenting these skills to an employer, for example phrasing their past achievements, youngsters are kind of… lost. Moreover, in our internships, we form teams of students usually guided by an experienced engineer, but that still have to keep their autonomy.

That is why not only when we recruit students, but also when we recruit our staff, we pay a

lot of attention to soft skills that will help the teamwork at its best.

Communication. Definitely.

Communication is not about talking a lot, communication is about delivering and receiving a message clearly and asking well-phrased questions. This has an important impact on the IT industry. Starting with the requirements, the tasks, the problems encountered during a project, all these aspects need to be clearly described, because confusion can cause big problems.

Be a team player

So communication is not only about the message, it’s also about the style, about how you say things. In projects, sometimes one will work under pressure, that’s for sure. That is why being empathetic with your colleagues, offering your support and knowing how to give and receive feedback, will just ease the work and help focus on the solution, not on problems.

But still know how to work independently

That means we need somebody who is proactive and knows how to seek and get information right away. A programmer should have his own tricks, a good list of online resources and a good sense of how to use those resources in critical time.

Good understanding of the consumer

One thing young tech enthusiast should keep in mind: programming is for computers, programs are for human beings. That is why, during the interview, we try to find out how the programmer sees his final work, how he envisions the product and what benefits does he or she believe that the product will bring to the final user. This is also a good way to test one’s creativity.

Keep a positive attitude

Focusing on solutions and not on problems will not only ease your way in your career, but also in your life! Positive people will turn challenges into opportunities, and won’t feel overwhelmed. Another thing that I have noticed in people that have a positive attitude is that they are also realistic. They set goals to achieve because they correctly appreciate their value and their capacities. They won’t underestimate themselves and they will always try to give their best in order to be pleased with themselves. A positive thinking is also connected to a good health, good sleep and a great dose of energy, so who wouldn’t like his employees to be like that?

This week we will start the interviews for this summer internship. 8 students will have the opportunity to experience something very close to a real job. Of course, the technical challenge won’t be a piece of cake, but the real challenge will be working in a team.

At the end of the internship, they will have to present their project to all our employees. In order to do that, they will have to talk about the team and also about how they contributed to the project. After that we will decide who will make the next step: get a part-time job!

So dear students and young professionals, try to learn some soft skills too because you are going to need them!

Outsourcing to Romania is already a frequent option for those business people who are looking for an effective way to benefit from high-quality services at fair costs.

The IT sector – the fast-growing industry in Romania

According to recent studies that analyze Romania’s economic evolution during the recent years and after the integration in the European Union in 2007, the IT sector is one of the fastest growing industries in Romania. This country possesses a significant potential in information technologies, especially in the field of software development.

Considering the fact that all the data confirm the positive trend that Romania is on, outsourcing here gets even more likely in 2015. Here are 4 reasons why you should do it too:

As part of the European Union, Romania aligns itself to the European policies. This offers a key advantage through the higher degree of reliability and its financial stability. Fitch positively rates in his last report the fiscal system and the economic outlook for the country, altogether with the low inflation levels, that is below the target band predicted by the National Bank of Romania. In the last report issued by Standard & Poor’s,  Romania has been rated as „stable”, considering its strong economic performance and the hospitable political climate for outside investments. In 2014, the GDP of the country increased by 2.9%, according to the National Institute of Statistics and the ITC sector helped this growth with 6%.

Significant software engineering talent pools

The A.T. Kearney’s Global Services Location Index in 2014 states that Romania is one of the best nearshore locations for continental Europe. The country has a large software engineering talent pools, occupying number 18 out of 50. With over 64000 IT specialists, Romania is the leader in the EU by the number of employees per capita in the ITC sector and it ranks 6th place worldwide. Each year, more than 4000 IT students are pure computer science graduates. This is the effect of a good education system and a continuous learning process.

Romanians have excellent foreign language skills. They can easily learn and speak French, Italian or Spanish, due to their common Latin root language. But various studies and reports have shown that they are top English learners too. According to the latest Eurostat report,  99.1 % of the pupils learn English in general programmes, more than 86% French and 11.2 % German.

Romania is Europe’s emerging internet hosting destination. With plenty of companies setting up their web host in this eastern European jurisdiction benefits from super-fast speed and affordable costs. Romania has one of the world’s fastest download speeds, with an average of 47.9 megabits per second; in fact, that’s 160% faster than the global average. 

Specialists are estimating that Romania is going to become the country with the biggest growth potential in the software industry in Central and Eastern Europe.

If outsourcing is a part of your business plan for 2015 and you want a long-term, committed partner, give Romania a closer look.

The team

A great definition of the concept of “team“ is “an exciting mixture of qualities, abilities, and perspectives”. When it comes to teams spread worldwide, one can add to the definition “with different background regarding the culture and education”. The team can ensure the success or the failure of a project.

Research has shown that remote teams encounter some difficulties at the beginning of the projects as a consequence of misunderstanding the tasks and feedback. This is caused by the cultural differences, the language barriers or the novelty of the project, but can be fixed if some tactics are applied.

Language barriers are no longer a problem

Ensure a good level of speaking and understanding of the language for the team you work with. But also be aware that you should give people some time to acquire the communication style you are promoting

Set up a communication flow and a reporting style that encourages feedback. Even if you bring together the best professionals, they still have to set up as a team. They assume a common vision of the project and contribute to the improvement of the software, by offering feedback.

Providing face-to-face meetings at least with the leaders of the remote teams will encourage informal communication, team identification, and cohesion. This can be considered an investment in the project, with a large return when it comes to increasing productivity.

Moreover, researchers like Martin Hoegl or Holger Ernest actually revealed that remote teams can perform as well as the teams located in the clients’ office, and even better, because of this need of permanent communication and demand for clarifications.

Ensuring the control of the project

There are many tools available for controlling your outsourced projects. We mention JIRA and TFS, our favorites, but also Redmine or Trello. At a simple search, Google displays dozens of such tools.

These tools will ease your project management. They allow you to track and plan activities for multiple projects. Moreover, they can actually help you to better understand your team by monitoring the time they spend on a task or the problems encountered during the development process. So you get the big picture of what you want to do and then you start to set tasks and assign the persons responsible for each of them.

From this point on, you are able to see how everything works: you set the frequency of your online meetings and get feedback from your team via a video call software like Skype, Google Hangouts etc. You can also keep an eye on the ongoing tasks because every user has to set the state of his work. For example, one can pause a task because of some kind of encountered difficulty, but can also add a comment in order to clarify the reason why the task is on hold.

The person in charge of monitoring the progress of the project can always see how the remote team is performing. Moreover, you can improve your estimations for the tasks and for the next sets of periods of time needed for development.

Furthermore, if you want to protect the data, you can set your own virtual machine and the members’ of your remote team will connect via a secure network (VPN). You can easily set your own method for tracking the work done by using documents that divide the project into tasks. Actually, the logic is the same, just that you will need a separate bug tracker.

Lessons learned

1. Setting up a team means that people must adapt to a specific way of working and get the same picture as you do when it comes to the project. So one must be patient a few weeks before things just start to roll out!

2. Remote teams might be as productive as local teams. Their actions are tracked permanently and the scrum meetings allow solving issues and giving feedback. Different educational backgrounds mean a different approach that could actually improve your project!

3. Think about using software to keep a well-organized project and follow the work of your team. You can also make your own system, so in order to make sure that you are in full control of your project!