Leading Utility Solution Provider – Staff Augmentation

Utility Solutions Provider Staff Augmentation

Leading Utility Solution Provider – Staff Augmentation

Utility Solutions Provider Staff Augmentation
Last Updated: February 20, 20243 min readCategories: Utility & Energy
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Leading Utility Solution Provider Selects QAT Global for Staff Augmentation

Assembling an Experienced Team of Onshore and Offshore Resources for the Full Development Lifecycle

Customer Snapshot

  • Utility Solutions Provider
  • International Locations

Solution Snapshot

  • The initial project team was established with 6 members which were later increased to 9
  • Regular sprints/releases are successfully complete every 4 to 8 weeks

Key Differentiators

  • Brazilian Offshore capability
  • Multi-location team
  • Scrum Methodology and Project Management
  • Small consulting company focused on the success of the customer

The Challenge

The client has many “internal” utility provider-facing projects and solutions, however, with the recent acquisition of a new analytics application they needed help getting it up and working in their new environment. In this case, our customer was looking for experienced expert developers and leaders to extend an existing team and provide full development lifecycle staff augmentation.

This solution included a wide variety of front-end and back-end technologies that were uncommon for QAT. Thus, the team was tasked with learning many new skills in a short amount of time. However, in this case, QAT Global could overcome this challenge partly through meeting with the customer often but also because of the experience of the team and their ability to adapt to using new technologies, tools and development approaches.

In addition, since the application was pre-existing it was a challenge for the QAT Global team to “step in” and learn this existing application. However, in this case, because of the great relationship QAT Global has with this customer and a long track record of success, QAT Global was given full access to all the source repositories and full access to the customer so they could quickly get “up to speed” on the existing application.

Another challenge was related to the integrated development team. Application development was a joint effort between customer resources and QAT Global Brazil resources.  Often this type of arrangement causes problems because of time zone differences, language struggles, cultural differences.  However, because of the QAT Global standard development lifecycle patterns and practices, all of this was easily overcome.  With the assistance of a US-based architect, the integration of the staff augmentation teams is seamless.

Requirements determination was a significant challenge.  With this project, there were sometimes no business owners and sometimes many business owners. In addition, “requirements” often came in the form of a simple one-line sentence or idea.   This, in turn, required the QAT Global team to work through the process of further defining and sometimes even prototyping possible solutions to the customer’s “requirements”.

Skills Needed:

  • Ajax
  • Angular JS
  • Bootstrap
  • CSS3
  • Eclipse
  • GIT
  • Handle Bars
  • High Charts
  • HTML5
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • JQuery
  • Maven
  • Mongo database
  • Morphia object-document mapper
  • Play Framework

QAT Global’s Solution

To assemble a team of “seasoned” developers and leaders to join the effort and quickly assimilate to the technologies and development lifecycle being used by this customer.  This included resources from both the U.S. and QAT Brazil.

QAT Global assisted the customer in implementing and enhancing an existing web-based data analytics application solution.  This included requirements gathering and documentation along with many meetings to review and finalize requirements which lead to development, implementation, and testing.  Along with the customer, daily SCRUM meetings were conducted where project statuses were reviewed along with various demos showing progress within each sprint.  Our success with this customer project has enabled us to participate and contribute at multiple levels within the application solution, including architecture, backend/frontend designs as well as directly interfacing with the product/application owners. This, in turn, led the customer on several occasions to request additional QAT Global staff be added to the project team.