Why Ukraine might be the best IT offshoring option you never thought of

Offshoring is a cost-effective way to expand your IT expertise and scale your talent pool without having to hire additional employees. It can also be a great way to lower project costs, therefore maximizing your IT budget.

As a global IT partner with more than 25 years’ experience, Beyondsoft has been helping major corporations around the world drive innovation and help meet business goals through offshoring. With highly skilled technology professionals in locations like Malaysia, Singapore, India, China, and Mexico, Beyondsoft provides plenty of options for offshore support in multiple time zones.

In April of 2020, Beyondsoft announced the acquisition of Boyle Software. Headquartered in New York, Boyle Software brings to the table a deep expertise in applications development. It also brings a growing presence in Ukraine, an up-and-coming destination for IT offshoring.

Discover why Ukraine is considered an excellent location for offshore support and why it may be the ideal option for you.

Why choose Ukraine for your offshoring needs?

There are many benefits to offshoring IT work, whether you want to save money, accelerate a project, or tap a specialized skillset. And each offshoring destination offers unique advantages.

Ukraine is a rising tech star amongst Eastern European countries, quickly gaining traction as a prime option for offshoring. With an IT industry expected to top $5.4 billion in 2020 and a rigorous educational system that emphasizes STEM learning, it’s no surprise that approximately 20% of the world’s leading companies, including Siemens, Samsung, and Microsoft, have a presence in Ukraine.[i] With 185,000 IT specialists in Ukraine, approximately 53% are software developers.[ii] In fact, GSA UK named Ukraine as Offshoring Destination of the Year in 2017.

One reason Ukraine is so popular is that it’s an economical choice for offshoring. SkillValue ranks Ukraine in the top ten countries and notes that Eastern Europe offers a good value for money.[iii] Thanks in part, to a lower cost of living, the average IT salary is slightly less than the global average of $54,000 and far less than the average US salary of $109,000.[iv] Meanwhile, because IT careers in Ukraine pay much more than other professions in the country while offering opportunities such as travel, IT is a highly coveted and competitive profession. Additionally, the Ukrainian government has adopted friendly tax laws in recent years, creating favorable conditions for companies that wish to offshore.

Time zone and geographical proximity to Europe also make Ukraine more appealing for offshoring. For example, Kiev is ten hours ahead of Seattle and just seven hours ahead of New York, which can make project collaboration easier, especially compared to locations in Asia, such as India and Philippines, which are 15 hours or more ahead. Furthermore, Ukraine does not require a visa for US or EU citizens to enter the country, which makes business travel from the United States much easier.

With exceptional levels of education and in-country expertise, we find that Ukraine is particularly suited for high-end consulting work which can be a fraction of what the same work would cost in the United States. Our typical client experiences long-term cost savings of 40-65% when offshoring to Ukraine. According to HackerRank, Ukraine is listed as number 11 amongst countries with the best developers which makes Ukraine an exceptional value. The most popular programming languages amongst their IT professionals include Java, Javascript, C#, PHP, Python and C++.[v]

Why American Media, Inc. chose Ukraine

A great example of a Ukraine offshoring success story is American Media, Inc. (AMI), which owns and operates leading celebrity and health and fitness media brands such Star and Muscle & Fitness. In 2015, AMI was paying increasing amounts on website hosting, while getting decreasing value for their money. They needed to get their costs under control while still providing a stellar online experience for their customers.

Based in Ukraine, HeartyHosting is an AWS hosting solution offered by Beyondsoft subsidiary, Boyle Software, that provides performance and stability at highly competitive rates. By switching key brands to HeartyHosting, AMI has been able to save substantially over the past five years while delivering faster page-load times and better uptime.

Offshoring to Ukraine can be an excellent choice for many corporations. If you’d like to learn more about our offshore services in Ukraine or in other locations, contact us today.

[i] UNIT.City (2019) ‘Tech Ecosystem Guide to Ukraine,’ available at: https://tech-ukraine.com/ (accessed July 23, 2020)

[ii] N-iX (2019), ‘Ukraine: The Country that Codes,” available at: https://www.n-ix.com/software-development-in-ukraine-2019-2020-market-report/ (accessed July 23, 2020)

[iii] PentaBlog (2019) ‘IT Ranking: Where to Find the Best Developers,’ available at: https://www.pentalog.com/blog/IT-ranking-world-top-developers (accessed July 23, 2020)

[iv] HackerRank (2020) ‘HackerRank Developer Skills Report,’ available at: https://info.hackerrank.com/rs/487-WAY-049/images/HackerRank-2020-Developer-Skills-Report.pdf (accessed July 23, 2020)

[v] N-iX (2019), ‘Ukraine: The Country that Codes,” available at: https://www.n-ix.com/software-development-in-ukraine-2019-2020-market-report/ (accessed July 23, 2020)

Agile Transformation: Reasons for failure

Agility and flexibility to meet business needs in a quicker manner is becoming more and more relevant in today’s technology world. Business needs, priority, and requirements change with the fast-paced market, and technology needs to be locked in at the same pace. Big organizations are now adopting agility in their software development cycle to help business derive stronger revenues from the market in real time. 

Agile Transformation is a journey that organizations take and face lots of obstacles. It is important to know these obstacles in advance and to implement appropriate mitigation plans at an enterprise level to ensure Agile Transformation success.  

Some of the biggest challenges that organizations face are listed below. 

Enterprise-wide commitment to transform into Agile organization 

Transforming an organization to be agile is a radical change and might take some time. Teams in this process go through a metamorphosis and need to adapt to techniques and processes that work for the team and the organization. This needs to be in alignment with the vision set by the executives, as well as agile principles. Sometimes teams develop a version of waterfall-agile strategy that helps them deliver faster without understanding and applying Agile principles correctly. That is a definite recipe for disaster. Teams should take smaller steps, reflect on what’s working, and never lose sight or motivation to meet the end goal. 

Executive support and training  

In the Agile world, even though teams are self-organized and empowered to execute their sprint plans, the product roadmap and business value is determined by executives and stakeholders. When stakeholders do not have enough knowledge of Agile principles, they can make it difficult for teams to continue working as Agile teams. This leads to a lot of frustration on both sides, and, as a result, Agile is usually blamed for being a dysfunctional environment. Executives need to be involved in the process to be able to provide directions to the teams. You want your executives to be part of the process. 

Cultural change 

Sometimes organization culture clashes with Agile values, and teams need to unlearn older, traditional ways of doing business. Most developers insist on clear, written business requirements and functional specifications, though they may not be comfortable working closely with the business. On the other hand, the business may not be  familiar with technology and the software building process. 

For tighter collaboration, teams need to work harder to change their attitudes and perspectives and see the value in closer teamwork.  

Four founding pillars to successfully implement Agile Transformation are: 

  • Respect – to not consider resources as just warm bodies but skillful, high-quality teams fulfilling business needs with agility. 
  • Trust – Agile requires teams to be self-organized and be less controlled by management or business executives. This trust needs to be built on by changing cultural values. 
  • Humility – There is no command center in an Agile team, and both technology and business teams need to come together to form one team and be able to understand each other’s world and needs.   
  • Building good working relationships – Executives should support this. 

Tracking Agile maturity 

Retrospective and reflection are the biggest parts of Agile framework. Tracking the processes and Agile principles’ applications along the way can help teams improve their Agile practices. It helps the team build a culture where they are continuously self-reflecting and looking at ways to better the process.  

Retrospectives should focus on what is going well for the team, what is not going well, and what are the areas that they need to improve upon. Teams can continue what is going well, discard what is not going well, and come up with ideas for needed changes. Adding metrics to factors like team health, sprint health, technology health, etc. are good indicators for where the team needs help and guidance. Without these metrics and retrospectives, teams tend to lose focus around the idea of Agile transformation and tend to cut corners to settle for whatever seems to be working for them. This lands them in a gray area that is not specifically agile nor their traditional way of software development, making their productivity less than when they started. So, tracking and retrospectives are key factors to ensure that the team continues to progress along the path that they set out on. 

Many organizations tend to give up during this time, as issues crop up during the transformation that demotivates the team. 

Clear team roles and framework 

Teams should clearly define roles and responsibilities for all key players. In Scrum, Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Development teams have their own places and should not replace or overshadow each other.  

Product Owners need to have enough domain knowledge to guide teams, be able to work with stakeholders, and make critical priority decisions on behalf of the business. Scrum Masters should not just be relegated to facilitating scrum ceremonies but should be the mentor for the team, as well as the problem solvers. Product Owners or Scrum Masters should not micromanage every activity of the project and instead trust development teams to carry out their roles as a self-organizing team. 

Other documents like a Team Working Agreement, Definition of Ready, and Definition of Done go a long way to stating clear directions to the team. Confusion and chaos within scrum teams will kill the entire idea of agility, and hence these clearly laid out plans are the key to a successful transformation. 

Web content management: Improving intranet search results

Web content management, when applied to a corporate Intranet, means more than buying into an expensive or feature-rich content management system (CMS) software suite. Just like the vastly broader Internet, a corporate Intranet presents company information for internal consumption by its employees and trusted business partners. One of the most often-heard complaints from Intranet users is, “I can’t find what I’m looking for.”  

In the modern era of Intranets, the issue that plagues most organizations is an over-abundance of content being available. Search technology has advanced greatly in recent years; however, inaccurate and irrelevant search results are continually being presented to queries no matter what CMS software suite is being used. The lack of a proper taxonomy with keywords and metatags as well as removal of obsolete content is often the cause of poor search results.  

Without going into search scopes and refiners, this post will address the more basic elements of improving content relevancy from a Taxonomy (information classification and keywords) standpoint rather than an CMS’s Information Architecture (visual grouping and navigation). 

Simply uploading a piece of content into a CMS doesn’t help improve relevancy. Properly tagging the item can go a long way toward improving search results when the item is indexed by the search crawler – the process in which the CMS indexes its content. These keywords are used to boost the content’s relevancy when matched against search queries. For example, a company’s Human Resources department publishes a PDF file with the current year’s vacation policy to their Intranet. This is tagged as ‘Vacation Policy’ and indexed by the search crawler. Users who search for the term ‘Vacation Policy’ (or variations of it) would see this item higher up in the corresponding search results. 

Not all content published in a corporate Intranet should live indefinitely. Events come and go, information on webpages become outdated, and company policies require updating. These are just a few examples of what could clutter search results. Continuing with the previous example, the following year an updated version of the company’s vacation policy is published. A new PDF file is uploaded by a different HR user to a different library within the Intranet. This is also indexed by the search crawler. However, if the previous year’s policy is not deleted or archived to be excluded from the search crawl/index, both documents may be returned in a user’s query for ‘Vacation Policy.’ Now imagine this scenario across all departments within a large organization, year over year. Now you can begin to see how the problem can become overwhelming.  

With more powerful content management systems available, we can now publish content almost as easily as we are able to delete it. Without proper governance controls and enforcement of the use of metatags with our content, we increasingly make search results that end up being much more difficult to decipher. It’s easy to blame the search engine, but often we should be focusing more on cleaning up the content rather than the search mechanism – the cleaner the content that goes into a CMS, the more relevant the search results will be. 

Interested in learning more? Contact our team today.

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Should program managers fear artificial intelligence?

Over the last couple of decades we’ve had some fundamental shifts in the way people work together on projects to improve efficiency. Artificial intelligence, although still in its relative infancy, is rapidly gaining momentum as the “next big thing” or at least, it is rapidly occupying our thoughts as “experts” warn of our impending doom. Regardless of how dystopian the future may look like in 100 years, we’re still quite a ways from integrating even basic artificial intelligence (AI) across the board to help drive key business decisions on a project and program level.

Regardless of how sophisticated our programming and mathematical modeling is, management is still (and will always be) inherently about managing people and not data. Understanding and navigating relationships to inspire the best and most fulfilling work is still an integral part of a manager’s day to day, and AI is simply not equipped to handle this anytime soon. However, where AI does offer a dramatic shift is in using data and analytics to identify gaps in the way companies implement their products and services.

(Or you can use algorithms to draw fun hats!)

Living in an increasingly interconnected world, the level of circulating data we can use to glean insight is staggering, and without AI (or an unreasonable amount of time and energy) it is simply impossible for organizations to tap into this “wisdom of crowds” to better inform their next steps.

Understandably, there is still a lot of fear from people worried that AI will take away their jobs, but the more likely scenario is that AI will remove the burden of tedious labor and input to instead give rise to the need for creative capital. Processing power is designed to deductively sift through the facts, but innovating on and interpreting these insights is still a more elusive task for even the most ambitious of AI projects.

Managers need to use machine learning to leverage their existing data sets and find ways to optimize and capitalize on new opportunities. Ultimately, a company is most profitable in a society when it delivers value based on real world challenges. Machine learning can identify gaps in User Experience, identifying patterns of behavior both positive and negative that managers can take to their teams to address. It should also be used to react to market trends, better understand what drives customer decisions, and identify cost saving measures that reduce operating inefficiency.

AI in all of its various forms is being used to widen the gap between companies and their competitors. The more sophisticated the applications of ML within these organizations, the more work smaller firms need to do to stay competitive. Luckily, ML tools are becoming more widely available, and experimenting with AI can offer many benefits at very low costs. The most important ingredients in a successful ML pilot is creativity and perspective, and this is where strong managers need to step in to lead the journey.

Interested in learning more? Contact our team today.