News from ERNI

A year has passed now since the start of remote work at ERNI in regard to the corona outbreak. How has the everyday working life changed and how do we tackle the related challenges? Today Joel Sommer from our Zurich site shares his tips for an efficient home office practice.

Every year, the number of companies which are involving end users in the earliest stages of software development to gather and incorporate feedback as soon as possible rises. But there are still plenty of companies which are getting in touch with the end user only after the entire product is released and ready to be used for the first time.

The IoT world is a big world that everybody is talking about. IoT products nowadays come in different forms –some are labelled as IoT, but in fact they represent only a small portion of what an IoT product really entails. A fully fledged IoT project not only requires programming and hardware expertise but also expertise on a broad range of domains from energy to smart home and even automotive.

The business world is influenced by trendy buzzwords, often tagged with the hashtag #. In this article I am taking a deeper look at three of those that are related to the current work setting: NewWork, Agile and Digital Transformation.

Travelling can be chaotic, so count yourself lucky if you have a map. It’s essentially the same for the customer journey, with one small difference – it’s not the travellers who need a map.

We are continuing our series on experiences of newjoiners at ERNI. Now, Georgi, our colleague from ERNI Germany speaks about his first year at the company.

Have you ever found yourself thinking about what drives us as people and keeps us motivated? Today, our colleague Barbara Schiller from ERNI Germany tells us about a book that changed her perspectives – Drive by Daniel H. Pink. Read the book summary.

How to keep team morale on a high level during remote work? That was the question I asked myself as a Scrum Master after the situation Covid-19 forced the teams to work from home.

Michal Piskozub joined ERNI Germany in January. He is part of the new team in Schorndorf and works as a Test Engineer. Read about his experience during the first month at the company.

Where do banks and insurance companies stand in the digital change? Where do they want to go and how is this to be achieved? For the purpose of situation assessment, ERNI has developed the Digital Maturity Fitness Check.

A month since Leonard started his journey at ERNI on 4 Jan 2021, he would love to share his discoveries with regards to ERNI. Some nuggets of information using the 10P’s for Business model that Leonard has created back in 2019, over a period of time he mentions here.

“Erni? Like Erni and Bert? No ERNI! So, my family and friends didn’t just react once when I talked about my new job”, says Florian Benzler. Here is his experience during the first month at the company.

We have many active communities at ERNI that make up our global team spirit. At ERNI Romania, the book club recently red and talked about the Midnight library. Find out what the members have to say about this book.

Backlog Refinement – formerly known as backlog grooming – is one of the meetings practiced in Scrum. It is a regular meeting where the Product Owner and the Development Team add detail, estimates and order to items in the Product Backlog. Read about what our expert Joffrey Zehnder has to say about his experience and best practices.

Nowadays, in a more digitised era, there is an increasing need to develop new applications faster and faster. Things are moving quickly and so is the demand for shorter time-to-market with lower costs. Serverless Architecture is a relatively new and rising approach that promises just that. We will explore the characteristics and benefits of Serverless Architectures to see how this can be an option worth considering the next time we go to choose our technology stack.

Leonard Cheong joined ERNI Singapore on 4 January this year as Managing Director. After his first 2 weeks, he describes his impressions and his onboarding process.

Technology has always been important in banking, as the long history of e-banking shows. But today, technological progress, changing customer behavior and the entry of new competitors have led financial institutions to intensively address the issue of digitalisation and the associated opportunities and risks. Our guest author Prof. Dr. Andreas Dietrich points out some of these developments.

Pavo Kohler joined ERNI in May 2016. In this interview, he summarises the book by Horst Schulze, Excellence Wins.

Mobile payment is growing rapidly. The proportion of contactless card payments in Switzerland has more than doubled in the last 12 months, while cash withdrawals from ATMs are declining. Since the beginning of the Corona crisis, payments have also been increasingly made by using mobile phones and Smartwatches. In a highly competitive environment, the brand profile of the providers is crucial.

It has become obvious that being ready for a digital change has become one of the biggest challenges tech companies face nowadays and ERNI, as an IT services provider, will certainly be a part of it.

Evert Smit joined ERNI in September 2018. Currently Principal Consultant, Evert is responsible for topics like Strategy, Change Management, Digital Transformation and Data Intelligence. In this interview, he summarises the bestselling book by Juval Noah Harari, Sapiens. He will also speak about how this book influenced him in his sales and leadership role.

Six ERNIans from the Spanish Agile Community attended the Agile in the New Normal event, allowing us to learn about recent tendencies, meet some new agilists and bring more knowledge to the Community and to ERNI. We enjoyed various keynotes related to Agile and how different companies are adapting to the ‘new normal’. Keep reading to find out more about this event.

Brand experience design aims to form strong experiences for users. This consists of much more than just a good logo and a snappy tagline. For a genuine experience the spirit of the company must be captured and transmitted through all touchpoints.

Distributed Ledger Technology or “Blockchain“ is also considered a game-changer in the financial services sector. Is it just hype or are there already useful applications in banks and insurance companies?

In the recent episode of the Book summary series our colleague Nikol Laschan speaks about her book tip Failosophy. Find out more about the art of failure.

Today’s agile book summary comes from our Principal Consultant Patrick Wilhelm. What does Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder say to its readers? How can it navigate you especially in times of insecurity like the ones we live in now?

The number of digital touchpoints between consumers and brands continues to grow. For successful communication, they must be specifically selected and managed. The strategic and systematic management of all contact points between the person and the brand is crucial for success and presents companies and agencies alike with a number of challenges.

Robotic Process Automation, or RPA for short, has raised many hopes in recent years and caused a stir in the financial services industry. What can this technology do and what can it not do? Sandra Bruderer and Remo Rambaldi, Senior Consultants at ERNI, recommend a well-considered use of software robots.

For a leading developer and manufacturer of injection and infusion systems for self-medication and a renowned diabetes specialist we performed an Agile Fitness Check. Learn more about what the customer gained.

Michael R. Wade had probably just seen the film classic Dracula or the horror flick Eclipse when he coined the term “Value Vampire“ in connection with the digital disruption of our days. The professor for innovation and strategy at the IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland, uses it to describe young companies that are destroying existing business models without mercy: “They offer their products or services extremely cheap or even free of charge and thus suck out the profit pool, which leads to shrinking market shares for the established providers.“ At the same time, these startups also convinced consumers with a better customer experience and innovative services.

In this episode of our series about Agile best practices, we focus on sprint planning as the first of the Scrum ceremonies. Joffrey Zehnder and Zuzana Gočová explain what they have encountered in their work as Agile coaches, including the pitfalls they frequently experience and how to avoid them.

Cross-platform mobile development surpasses the limitations of native mobile development. You only need one team that can develop apps for both Android and iOS, instead of having two teams that develop apps on each platform separately. Since its release two years ago, Flutter has been used by developers as one of their go-to cross-platform mobile development framework.

Make or buy? Do-it-yourself or outsourcing? Every company today is challenged to put itself, its services, its organisation and its costs to the test bench again and again. At the latest, this raises the question of what belongs to one’s own core competencies and what does not? And this is followed by the question of whether it is advantageous to outsource certain processes or areas. However, this decision can be quite complex and is not so easy to make.

Are your Scrum Daily meetings lasting more than 15 minutes? Are you achieving Dailies’ goals?

Patrik Opát joined ERNI in April 2019. With his previous experience as Scrum Master, IT Business Analyst and IT Consultant, he became Service Unit Leader of Scrum Masters and Product Owners on our Bratislava, Slovakia site later in January 2020. Patrik follows his motivation of helping people improving their work life through coaching, guidance, process improvements and removing impendments.

The reasons for outsourcing are actually always the same: Lack of in-house expertise – i.e. too few or not the right employees on the one hand – and concentration on the core business on the other. Often there is also a lack of internal resources for the implantation of new technologies such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence or virtual reality.

Simply capturing data doesn’t automatically make for good customer relations. The desired effect is only achieved when you have the right idea to match.

Are people outside the team assigning directly tasks to the scrum team members? Is the team clear about what they are expected to do?

Christine Salzeller has been with ERNI since 2017. In 2013, at her previous job, she first came in contact with Agile and Scrum, which she got to know as an alternative to the classical waterfall model. She took over the role of a Scrum Master at ERNI in April 2019 and currently coaches three teams. In this interview, Christine tells us what a typical day of an Agile coach looks like.

Today’s agile book summary comes from our Agile Coach Christian Glück. Read about why he thinks the book This is Lean from Niklas Modig and Pär Åhlström is the best he has read so far.

Brands must act successfully throughout the entire customer journey. And this doesn’t end once a successful purchase has been made.

Have you ever wondered what makes an Agile practice run smoothly? The factors are described widely. From daily life, you can point out habits that make the difference and are worth following. In this series, our Agile expert Joffrey Zehnder reveals what he has learned throughout his years of working as an Agile Coach.

In our digital day and age companies can only be successful if they see things from the customer’s point of view and create a better customer experience.

Tanja Neuenschwander joined ERNI in September 2018. Currently, she is a Professional Consultant and a Product Owner of an agile team. She has been practicing agile for more than 10 years now in several different roles. She used to be a software developer and is now more focused on the business side of agile environments. Today, she introduces a book dealing with agile teamwork called The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni.

What does an outcome-based collaboration require from the customer? What do you have to prepare yourself for when considering switching to this kind of setup? Someone who can tell the best is one of our customers who introduced this model into their organisation. We talked to the Sourcing Manager at the customer about his view and experience.

Are you facing collaboration and tracking challenges on virtual retrospectives? Find tooling tips about how to boost your feedback loops.