SBA

Agile and Customer Focused

Agile and Customer Focused - this has to be a major aspiration for many companies but how many really achieve it? Both of these attributes are tough to deliver, but at least one IT company in the island is succeeding.

Antelle IT was formed in 2004 by Tony Jones, as a developer of business software. The company started life in Tony’s bedroom, with him as the sole employee, before graduating to the garage (the clichéd first home of so many IT companies).

Tony went to school at St. Ninians and has worked in software development since leaving university, initially within the local finance sector and IT suppliers before branching out on his own to develop bespoke solutions. One man bands often have a tough time of it because customers are wary of such small suppliers, but a significant amount of Antelle’s early work came from the States of Guernsey. Customer faith existed even though Tony was on his own, because when employed at a previous company he had developed the Island Games scoring systems for Guernsey so the States had confidence in him as a supplier for their new property portfolio management system.

Typical of many small software developers, Antelle’s early years are characterised by a hotch-potch of developments - an ePos system for a UK retailer, Payroll, Stock Control, Invoicing, Barcoding, ID Cards, Graphical Information Systems, Websites etc. Work came in from personal recommendations and repeat business. When Tony’s previous employer ran into trouble Antelle also picked up the maintenance and development of the MUA’s meter reading system adding to the portfolio of substantial clients who depend upon Antelle for maintenance, enhancement and development of core IT systems.

In 2007 Antelle made its first hire, another developer who had worked on the Island Games system with Tony. In 2009 the company expanded to three full time staff.

Behind this growth was a specialism. Antelle had been using Microsoft CRM to manage its own customer records, so had a head start when the opportunity came to develop a bespoke CRM system for a private bank. As the company’s first attempt at commercial CRM development the rate to the customer was discounted, and Antelle gained both a deep understanding of how to customise Microsoft CRM and a blue chip reference customer. CRM work soon became the mainstay of the company, and Antelle acquired more prestige CRM customers including the States of Guernsey and the Isle of Man Government. The company now provides CRM development and customisation for most of the Microsoft CRM customers on the island.

So how did a three-man firm become a trusted supplier to two Governments, a national utilities company, a UK retail chain and numerous prestige island clients? Whatever Antelle are doing they’re obviously getting it right.

First and foremost is a desire to satisfy the customer. The client base has consistently grown because Antelle has yet to fall out with one of its customers, Tony is very focused on making sure that the customer gets what they want and need. Second is that Agile business …

For most of us agile means the ability to change position or respond to circumstances quickly, but in the world of software development it has a more definite meaning. Agile is a recognised method or approach to developing software, and is usually explained by contrast with the other major method - Waterfall.

In the Waterfall software development process the flow of work usually cascades down a sequence of steps - requirements, specification, design, development, system testing, user acceptance testing etc. This is very efficient for the software company; customer interaction is minimised, the customers requirements are defined up front and can be the subject of a fixed price quotation and contract, and the developer then gets on and creates the system. At the end of the cycle, several months or possibly years later, the customer is presented with the software they ordered. It may not look or work as they originally envisaged, their needs may have changed in the interim, but the software will match the defined requirements even if the requirements were not well expressed. Many Waterfall developments are consequently immediately followed by a remediation project to fix the misunderstandings and accommodate the customer’s changed needs.

Agile takes the opposite approach. Intended to overcome the limitations of Waterfall, Agile development eschews detailed up-front capture of the requirements and design, instead preferring to work closely with the customer to develop a solution bit by bit. The cycle is basically to talk with the customer, develop a small piece of functionality, show it to the customer, correct if necessary and then move on to the next piece. Repeat until the customer says they have all they need for now. There are formal Agile methods, including Scrum and XP (eXtreme Programming), which may be used to manage this cycle, but in general Antelle don’t worry about the method, they just get on and work with the customer. The benefit of Agile is that the customer is always close to the development, and gets what they want without either the overhead of a big requirements / specification exercise up-front, or surprises when the final delivery is made. The downside is that providing an accurate quotation up front is sometimes impractical; that the eventual product will be good value has to be an act of faith by the customer given that he may be effectively committing a blank cheque up front.

Statistics from across the software development industry show that Agile frequently reduces software development costs by up to a third, but the customer must have trust in the supplier. Agile is the way Antelle work, no hefty specification up front, just developing software bit by bit working closely with the customer. Clearly Antelle’s customers trust them because Agile seems to work for both parties, and the business keeps coming in although the company has never advertised beyond a listing in the phone book.

Whilst the company has recently grown to four full-time developers, the availability of skills remains a problem, particularly given Antelle’s specialism in CRM. Despite being small, the company took matters into its own hands last year, forming the Antelle Academy. Basically it has, after assessing over 50 candidates, taken on two trainees with no previous experience and is growing them up from scratch. The company hopes that they will become productive employees in year two and profitable in year three, but for year one the company is carrying the weighty burden of both paying and training them as they work towards their Microsoft Certified Developer qualifications. With eyes firmly on the future the hope is to take these apprentices into full-time employees and then start growing the next ones. This self-reliance and determination to invest reflects the company’s culture, it is driving forward whatever the barriers.

From the garage Antelle moved into its first proper premises in Oncan during 2008. In 2012 the company moved again to Tromode, and in December last year were one of the victims of the flooding on the Tromode estate. In a mad 15 minute scramble as the waters rose the team unplugged and rescued all their servers from the ground floor to upstairs whilst the flooding in the office reached desktop height. Outside however the waters rose to nearer six feet and all five motor cars were lost as they floated away to be written off - the servers were more important. So the company has moved again, still within the Tromode estate but on higher, and hopefully safer ground and into larger, plusher premises which will give them more space to grow.

I asked Tony about the future for the company, and in his eyes it’s Digital. The increasing demand for digital services from customers presents an almost endless opportunity to connect the web to both CRM systems and back-office, perfectly aligning with Antelle’s accumulated experience and skillset.

Coming up immediately however, out of a project for a customer, is a new product, Conpletus. It’s a FATCA solution for US, UK, CRS and South Africa’s SARS schema and whilst it could be hosted if desired it has been designed from the outset to keep this highly sensitive data safe on the customer’s own systems. Conpletus will take data from a company’s in-house systems or from spreadsheets in order to prepare the regulatory FATCA submissions now being demanded from all FFIs.