ICT Group not only develops software for a wide range of applications, we also offer Managed Services. In other words: maintenance and management of existing software. One of the Managed Services customers is a innovation leader in the semiconductor industry. On March 1, this team celebrated its 10th anniversary.
Project leader Huub Janssen and technical coach and process monitor Marco de Greef have been there from the start. Huub explains: "The machines that the customer builds contain a lot of software components that are located throughout the machine. They develop this software itself, because this is a core competency for them. Until 2014, they also did the bug fixes themselves. But a big part of this work is repetitive, because you have to implement such a bug fix in all releases. That's what they call syncing. This syncing is not a core competency and that is why they wanted to outsource this work at the time."
Continuous improvement
ICT Group was commissioned by the customer to set up a permanent team, which would be specially trained for this task. Huub: "Because although syncing is repetitive work, it is also very specialized and error-prone work." To avoid mistakes, it is very important that a fixed process is followed, with clear steps for everyone. That's Marco's responsibility. "Initially, we took over their process, but we have optimized it over the years. We are constantly making adjustments. The more experience we get, the better we become and the fewer mistakes we get out of it at the very end, in quality control."
New process
At the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019, the process was completely overturned because the requirements set by them changed. Marco: "Because our work was immediately sent to the customer in a release, we were even more responsible for the quality. This affects all steps in the process; team members had to start thinking in a different way. Because you don't achieve quality just by performing a quality check at the end. You can only achieve quality if you put it at the heart of your thinking and working from the very beginning."
Well-established team
Marco and Huub are proud of the team, which has embraced this change and has made it their own very quickly. "We are a very cohesived team in which everyone has the goal of making each other better. There is a lot of 'learning on the job', team members help and motivate each other. The atmosphere is actually always very good," says Huub.
There is also a great deal of diversity. Employees come from different countries and almost half – nine out of twenty team members – are women. This is one of the reasons why customer contact runs so smoothly, Huub thinks. "Because everyone in our team has customer contact and there are even more different nationalities working at the customer than we do. Because our employees are used to dealing with people from different (cultural) backgrounds, they can easily adapt to the contact person on the customer side."
Great dynamism
Not only is the team diverse, but so is the work. Because unlike project teams at ICT Group that work on one project for a longer period of time with successive sprints that are in line with each other, there is much more dynamism in this Managed Services team, says Huub. "As I mentioned, we are working on all the software components in the machines. They are very different from each other. The syncs to fix an error have a lead time of up to two weeks and you almost always work on multiple syncs at the same time. So you have to be able to switch quickly. You also have a lot of customer contact, so there are also high demands on your communication skills. All this results in a very dynamic working environment."
A-ranking
The team has been scoring a high 'grade' for years. The customer ranks all suppliers on a five-point scale, from A to E. A means higher than their expectation. The ICT Group team has been achieving this score for several years in a row. "Even to the customers’ surprise," says Huub, "because there are very few suppliers who consistently continue to perform at such a high level. When we switched to the new sync process, They were also very excited about whether we would be able to continue to deliver the quality they wanted. They monitored this very closely and were surprised that we were able to adjust our working method so quickly. It's a really big thumbs up to all the team members; During that period, they took a huge step in their own development."
Good atmosphere
Marco and Huub are lucky that there is a lot of enthusiasm to join this Managed Services team. "Colleagues from other teams also see how good the atmosphere always is with us," says Huub. "Thursday is our regular office day. That's a real social day. Almost every week there is something to celebrate: a birthday, the end of Ramadan, King's Day. Those are also moments when employees treat the rest of the team."
It is clear that this good atmosphere is an important pillar of the success of this team. "Everyone in this team wants to help colleagues and make each other better. That mentality is crucial if, like us, you work on the basis of continuous improvement. The nice thing is that this also contributes to a very positive atmosphere. It's really cool to be able to guide this team," Marco concludes.
