Process

Step 1: Need Discovery

A key to success is to understand our client’s challenges and needs correctly and comprehensively. Poor or incomplete understanding of the client’s situation and desired targets can and will lead to mistakes and losses in all subsequent steps in the work process. Investing time and effort in the initial need discovery undertaking is crucial and always brings benefit later.

Solead can discover a client’s needs via onsite workshops and meetings, online communication with the client’s key people, and studying the client’s software and documentation. Our skilled and experienced engagement team will do its best to understand the client’s problem and to suggest a solution without distracting the client’s staff from their work and wasting their valuable time.

Before starting the discovery phase, we sign a NDA to protect the client’s IPR. Most often, the discovery phase results in contracts (MSA, PSA, SOW, SLA) between the client’s company and Solead.

 

Step 2: Team Setup

We build a dedicated team based on the client’s requirements and our understanding of the client’s needs. Except in rare cases, we suggest starting with a small team of 1 or 2 engineers and then gradually adding more specialists. We recommend mixing engineers of different seniority levels to improve the team’s health and achieve better cost effectiveness.

Building a proper team always takes time. However, due to good knowledge and tight connections to the local IT community and labor market, we usually assemble the right team faster than our competitors.

It’s crucial that the provided specialists are the right fit in many aspects. We pay attention to candidates’ tech expertise, soft skills, job commitment, career expectations, and other important criteria. If the staffing needs adjusting due to our oversight, we replace and ramp up the new engineer at our own expense.

Our clients are welcome to participate in the selection and approval processes of our team members. Moreover, we usually ask our clients to interview the initial team members because at the beginning, only the client has the most complete project vision.

 

Step 3: Knowledge Transfer

Every new project requires equipping the project team with necessary business, product, process, and technology knowledge. Depending on the project type (proof of concept, new development, maintenance and support), the extent of this knowledge may vary.

At Solead, we use numerous practices to facilitate and accelerate the knowledge transfer process. A knowledge map is created to assure that all the required information has been transferred. Project documentation, if it exists, can help greatly in achieving the initial project understanding. A few days workshop on the client’s site facilitates in-person collaboration and communication between the client’s and Solead’s key specialists.

Whenever possible, we prefer to absorb the project knowledge by doing real project tasks — a “learning-by-doing” principle. Our approach is to start with the project tasks requiring minimum project knowledge, and then go further and deeper.

Solead usually starts a new project with a small team. The first engineers go through the initial knowledge transfer process and then share the obtained knowledge with the next group of engineers using efficient in-office communication in their native language.

We fully realize that the knowledge transfer process shouldn’t interrupt the client’s staff from their main duties and shouldn’t take much of their worktime. We manage our team internally to effectively share the knowledge already obtained to avoid asking the client the same questions over and over.

 

Step 4: Value Generation

At this step, we are fully prepared to start the execution of development tasks and the delivery of produced results. We do not charge our clients until this point; our clients pay for the created and received value only.

We suggest using the Agile methodology, unless our client has another already established and running practice in house. Our Agile approach is based on intensive team communication, frequent product deliveries, and prompt reaction to feedback.

We encourage intensive communication between the Solead and client’s teams via emails, instant messaging, and teleconferences. We have advanced teleconferencing equipment in our office to make remote teams virtually closer.

With frequent demos and goal deliveries, we achieve a deep involvement of the client into the development process. The client sees the whole picture and keeps full control of the product development by the Solead team.

We promptly react to the clients’ feedback to assure that we are on track and meet the client’s needs. In unlikely case of a mismatch between the delivered results and the project requirements, we do the necessary rework at our own expense.

We prefer to work in the client’s environment, deployed in cloud or on the premises. This way, the client has full control and immediate access to our results. Each Solead engineer works under a personal account and follows the principle of “least privilege”.

We provide our clients with detailed work timesheets per each team member on a weekly basis. The approved timesheets serve as a basis for invoices. If needed, our professionals can report using the client’s time tracking tool as well.

Our engineers not only follow the client’s specifications and requirements, they also proactively give suggestions how to make the client’s product better.

 

Step 5: Progress Review

We conduct client satisfaction surveys on a quarterly basis. This tool helps us deliver the maximum value to our clients and to exceed their expectations. Our survey tool is not a formality — it is a working instrument designed to build a mutually profitable and a long-term successful partnership.

Our client satisfaction survey template has multiple evaluation criteria, including work quality, performance, accuracy, responsibility, communicability, manageability, and others. We gather both the overall feedback for the entire team and feedback for each team member.

Each client satisfaction survey brings us a lot of valuable data. We develop and implement a set of measures to address the client’s feedback. Our goal is continuous improvement of the client’s feedback and satisfaction with Solead’s services.

We do not hesitate to propose and initiate changes, even if they require specific efforts for implementation. Observing the daily performance of our team, we can often identify, prevent, or address emerging issues faster and better than a client operating on the other side of the globe.

We encourage personal contacts between the client’s team and Solead’s team as to enhance both teams’ integration and communication. The client’s employees are always welcome to visit the Solead team in our headquarters in the beautiful city of Lviv.