NearshoreNews 2013

Focus on the people and create loyalty Myth: Outsourcing is a black box that doesn’t require focus on the people doing the work.

Case: North Securities has proven the opposite and created strong results by focusing on employees.

Why outsource to Ukraine? S. 6Read the three good reasons.

Conscensia prepares the organisation for the future S. 5Line Milthers becomes new VP Global Delivery.

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Myth: Outsourcing is a black box into which you put specifications and receive code back.

I have often met people in the IT-industry who told stories about how they “just borrowed 15 Indians from one of their colleagues who didn’t need them for the next couple of weeks”, and I have often heard the same people talk about their problems with getting the level of efficiency out of their outsourcing that they had hoped for.

But is it really surprising that efficiency is not top notch if you view your outsourced developers only as “machines” with some technical skills? As a black box where you can input something in one end, and just expect to wait for the correct result to come out the other end?

No, it isn’t really, is it? You are dealing with people, and there are therefore many factors to focus on:

- What are their individual strengths?- Who works well with whom?- Who works best with the Danish part of the team?- Who is most passionate about certain types of tasks? - Who possesses the right expertise for the task?

At Conscensia, we recruit people based on both their personal and technical competences, and we test our candidates’ skills in both areas before we start offering them as regular attached developers to our clients.

We put considerable focus on them functioning well together as a team, both internally at our development centre in Lviv, and in correlation with the client they work for regularly.We believe that this is the right way to do things, and it has indeed turned out to create an immen-sely high efficiency and a really good return for our clients.

In this newsletter, one of our clients, North Secu-rities, explains what they have gained by kee-ping focus on the human being, and not just the technical qualifications - a story that clearly shows why this model works, and why it works well.

In our last newsletter, we started a new series aimed at dispelling the many myths about outsourcing. We cleared up the myth that you can only outsource your development if you do it from the beginning of a course of development. Now the time has come to focus on the people that form a development team.

Successful outsourcing is dependent on people

Carsten Hansen, CEO

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Focus on employees creates loyalty

At North Securities, the developers in Ukraine and the employees in Denmark are seen as equal. Ensuring that they are involved - and a focus on socialising - has created great loyalty and a high level of proactivity from the outsourced team.

Once a year, North Securities invite their three Ukrainian employees on a trip to Pandrup in the North of Jutland in Denmark. The focal point is professional updating, but it is also about seeing each other face to face, conversing with each other and having a nice time with private dinner parties or an ice hockey match. “We can feel it quite clearly in the time after one of these visits. Both in the general atmosphere, and in the under-

standing of the products we work with. You see, they get the opportunity to get to know us personally, and they get a concrete image of what we are working with. This gives us a more qualified input than what we could otherwise achieve,” Søren Reinewald, Operations Manager in North Securities explains.

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Proactive developers North Securities is behind Falck Sirius, a fleet ma-nagement system that helps companies optimise their fuel use, perform preventative maintenance on vehicles and plan routes optimally.

North Securities has no IT-developers in-house, so the development of the company’s internal IT-systems has been handled by Conscensia since 2008.

“The primary reason is of course that we, through Conscensia, gain access to IT-developers at a whole other cost than in Denmark, without com-promising on qualifications or quality of the work,” says Søren Reinewald who also appreciates the proactivity of his Ukrainian workers.

“It is important to us that they are able to alert us if they experience something that could be done in a better way. They are very autonomous in their working day, and they initiate things themselves to find better solutions,” he says.

From the start, North Securities has had a small team with Conscensia.

“Therefore, it was crucial that Conscensia could deliver the right personal profiles, and that they have good working conditions. If there was a high staff turnover on our team, we would experience problems, but this has not been the case - in five years, there have only been a few changes,” he explains.

The investment pays off The stability of the team is down to North Se-curities themselves having focus on employee welfare, and to Conscensia’s facilitation team creating a good setting for collaboration.

He is in no doubt that investing in employee welfare pays off - even if the employees have their everyday workplace more than a thousand kilometers away. “We get employees that are just as deeply com-mitted as if they were in-house,” he says.This commitment was, for example, evident in relation to one of the rare changes on the team, when the team leader changed jobs six months ago. “It was almost with tears in his eyes that he left, and he used all his energy on handing over as well as possible to his successor - it felt like his baby that he was handing over. We have also heard that since then, he has called the team to ensure that everything is as it should be. This kind of loyalty is of great value to us,” says Søren Reinewald.

“I feel that Conscensia is good at systemis-ing things. We have talks every month where we do a follow-up on how the team is work-ing, we have yearly staff development inter-views and other such things.”

Søren Reinewald,Operations Manager

”The team leader used all his energy on handing over as well as possible to his successor - it felt like his baby that he was handing over.

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The ice hockey club Aalborg Pirates can send the strong Canadian player Ned Lukacevic out on the ice for the rest of the season, due to, amongst other things, a sponsorship from Conscensia.Conscensia is now stepping into the sponsor group behind the Pirates due to a mix of local patriotism, a love of the sport, and business. “A couple of us at Conscensia have a penchant for ice hockey, so in many ways, it is an obvi-ous sponsorship for us. We are looking forward to becoming part of the business group behind Aalborg Pirates,” says Carsten Hansen, CEO of Conscensia.

The sponsorship means that Aalborg Pirates will play with Conscensia’s name and logo on their shirts for the rest of the season.

To create an organisation ready to handle several development centres around the world, Cons-censia recently adjusted its internal organisation. Line Milthers, who has been Relations Manager until now, has become VP Global Delivery, mea-ning that she now has the managerial responsi-bility for deliveries from the development centre in Lviv.

“This is not something that our customers will feel directly, but it means that we will get a stronger managerial focus on all processes in connection with our deliveries from Ukraine to our customers in Denmark. At the same time, we lead the organi-sation towards a scenario where we develop from more than one place,” says CEO Carsten Hansen.

The daily operation of the development centre in Lviv continues unchanged.

Conscensia sponsors Aalborg Pirates

Conscensia prepares the organisation for the future

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Why outsource to Ukraine?

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Because the quality is highConscensia’s office in Ukraine is situated in Lviv which is home to 25,000-30,000 IT-educated citizens, and thanks to the town’s universities, 1,000 new candidates graduate every year. This obviously creates a unique foundation for recru-itment of IT-specialists at a high level. All Cons-censia’s employees have a masters in computer science.

The two universities that Conscensia recruits from are placed at respectively number 1 and number 9 on the list of the best universities in Ukraine, so the candidates come from the top of their class. A range of foreign companies have already out-sourced to Lviv, so the candidates for the jobs are often already familiar with this way of working.

Because work culture in Denmark and Ukraine is similarIt is attractive for Ukrainian IT-developers to work for Danish companies as, among other things, they like the Danish work culture. There are of course cultural differences between the two countries - for example, Ukrainians tend to have a bit more faith in authorities and to be more private than the Danes - but there are more similarities than differences. We laugh at the same things and have the same attitude to work.

Because of this joint basis, it is possible to create a team in Ukraine that feels like an integrated part of the Danish company, and that plays a key role in the development of the company. This is especially successful for the Danish companies that invite their Ukrainian developers to Denmark and give them an opportunity to get to know the company. This ensures that the Danish cultural model becomes embedded in the Ukrainian team.

Because the price is lowEven though the IT-skills are at the same level as the ones you find in Denmark, the price difference is still considerable. Most companies would be able to save around 40% of their development costs by outsourcing to Ukraine.

As an outsourcing destination, Ukraine is compe-ting with India and other countries in the East that offer a lower hourly rate. But still, at Conscensia, our experience is that the advantages of the high quality and the cultural similarities in Ukraine make the country the best and most efficient choice for a lot of companies.

”The two universities that Conscensia recruits from are placed at respectively number 1 and number 9 on the list of the best universities in Ukraine, so the candidates come from the top of their class.

HeadofficeConscensia A/S

Hjulmagervej 55DK-9000 Aalborg

Tel. 8882 6262

info@conscensia.com

Development Center73, Heroiv UPA str.

Building 38, 4th floor79017 Lviv

Ukraine

Outsourcing - An investment in the futureConscensia is a company with wide-ranging experience and interest in outsourcing. We help you to launch a partnership between your business and our development centre overseas. You quickly acquire your own develop-ment team as an extension of your current business. And we assist you all the way.

Steffen TrefferTel. +45 2788 6360