Mattias, could you tell us about your business?
Itesco AB is an information broker that works with Swedish data about companies and private persons since 1999. About three years ago, we made a strategic decision to invest in upgrading the interface of our system, its logic, and the database contents, so that we could deliver data as good as possible for our clients. With the help of Sigma, we are about to reach our goal and ready to challenge the market on a full scale. You can find more about us at www.itesco.com
What were your expectations from the cooperation? Did you have experience of working with remote teams before?
We have known Sigma long before the start of this project, so it was a no-brainer to choose them again. However, this was a new experience with the remote delivery for me. Our impression and feeling now is that our wishes are always a priority and goal. Sigma professionals guide us showing what is possible, what is rational to do and come with alternative solutions if they see a better way to do the assignment. I don’t just want to receive a problem report, I want to see the suggestion on how to solve it, and Sigma delivers on this.
What are you working on now with Sigma?
We chose Sigma to advise us how to organize both internal office IT and IT development. At first, Sigma had a team of local consultants onsite for about half a year. After that we together decided to move development work and system maintenance to Sigma Software in Ukraine. Today Sigma is responsible for all system maintenance and development. Right now we are looking into if and how we could move the whole IT-environment to the cloud. Such a wide range of services means having high qualified and multi-expertise team available. We have Java core developers, front end engineers, devOps and, of course, support and management experts.
What is the biggest challenge when working with a remote team? How do you solve it?
The hardest thing to get is trust and handling the feeling of not having to control all the time. We get very good reports and communicate a lot with the Sigma staff. They are very flexible and always adjust reports and their work to our wishes.
Daniel Björkman adds to the interview: “Working as an IT department, not only as development/support team makes us reconsider and adapt general Agile development principles to best match our client needs. We are building our processes on top of Kanban falling back to Scrum when it comes about development of some product in limited timeframe. Multiple times we’ve got positive feedback from Itesco and hopefully we will continue and extend our collaboration in future.”
For more information, please contact Daniel Björkman.