The Challenge
Soon after its launch, Barracuda FX was named "Best High Growth Company" at InterTradeIreland's 8th annual All-island Seedcorn Business Competition in 2010. Looking for ways to grow sustainably, Barracuda FX recognized the imperative to improve their current platform. By improving their proprietary system's UI, they would be able to offer better services and onboard more clients, which proved hard with the current state of things.
Softjourn is pro-active and agile. They are certainly focused on doing their best to make the relationship work.— Maurice Curran, COO at Barracuda FX
To expedite the development process, Barracuda FX decided to hire Softjourn, as it offered the best collaboration model that would effectively expand the in-house team and increase overall productivity on the project. This strategic partnership enabled Barracuda FX to overcome many technological issues they were struggling to resolve and gave them access to a team of industry experts.
The Solution
Since this project was Barracuda FX's first experience with a distributed software development partnership, the company set out to find a partner who understood the industry and used best practices. Once Barracuda FX found Softjourn, both partners decided to go with a trial period to test the teams and gauge the effectiveness of distributed software development for Barracuda FX.
One of Barracuda FX's concerns was whether their on-site team and Softjourn's remote one would be able to cooperate effectively without taking too much time and effort to organize the process, set tasks, and so on.
Understanding this, Softjourn has organized its work using frequent and transparent communication to demonstrate the benefits of the virtual team model. In addition to the daily meetings between developers, Softjourn conducted a bi-weekly steering committee with Barracuda to talk about issues, measure progress and determine whether adjustments were needed.
The Benefits
Benefits of working with Softjourn on this project:
- Increased productivity. By optimizing our client's operational processes, Softjourn contributed to the acceleration in which the platform was serving its users and enabling foreign exchange.
- The partnership allows faster product development. Remote team management best practices resulted in less work in collaborating with remote team members.
- Increased competitiveness. Faster time to market compared to industry competition solidified Barracuda FX's place in the market.
Conclusion
This project showed our client the power of strategic thinking and planning as well as showed how successful business partnerships can drive business development. Looking for experts in the field demonstrated the potential of augmented teams and access to experts that understand the industry and are able to suggest more constructive solutions.
During the project, engineers from Barracuda and Softjourn worked hand in hand on several projects, and Softjourn's developers continued to suggest new solutions once there was room for improvement. If you sent to learn more about similar types of projects we have done or you need a team to work on your software solution - contact us!