No project is the same, no team is an exact copy of another, so why should the same approach work for every customer? Something to think about, isn't it? At icapps, we believe in customized solutions, both in the digital product we create and in the way we collaborate with our customers. We value close collaboration, open communication, and our customers’ opinions and feedback, and we like to give our teams the opportunity to work in the best possible conditions and on the most exciting projects. Therefore, we adapt our approach to each project because, as we already said, we strongly believe that no project or partnership is the same and no method can simply be copied.
Guiding you towards the collaboration sweet spot
With any new partnership we encounter, we believe it's important to find the 'sweet spot' for this specific collaboration. This sweet spot is determined by a series of parameters such as; what resources do you already have in place, how much experience do you have with creating and building digital products, who will take the lead in the project, is your business familiar to our teams, or is it rather specialized, what are the requirements in terms of working location, will the digital product be integrated with an existing ecosystem, ... ? As you can see, there are a lot of parameters you need to get to know and keep in mind when defining the fitting way of working. For each project we have in the pipeline, for each customer, we sit around the table with, we take all these parameters into account and work together to find the best fitting level of co-creation.
Anyway of working is possible, but to give it a framework and to help you find the right fit, we have defined three main approaches and turned them into a clear overview:
Team as a service
When you choose to adopt our team as a service, we provide a full-blown product team that can manage the complete lifecycle of your digital product, from start to finish, from setting up the baselines to deploying the product. We strongly suggest this when you have no one on your end with knowledge of digitalization. Of course, this does not imply that you’re not a part of the process, we always keep our customers involved.
Blended Team
When we work in blended teams, we opt for a full-on collaboration throughout the whole process. It means that we blend our teams together, in a way that they can complement each other. We believe this way of working empowers both our teams to work together towards the best digital product.
Digital Human
We provide consulting when a customer requires a highly skilled and experienced developer, digital marketeer, UX-, UI designer, Strategist, Scrum Master, … a digital human as we like to call it. Most of the time this is a temporary solution for when you want an expert’s eye on your product or when you have a temporary need in your team. By integrating one of our experts temporarily into the team, you will be able to give your digital product the boost it deserves.
Flexibility and adaptability as key success factors
Because we want to practice what we preach, we highly value flexibility both of our employees and of our organizational structure. A flexible mindset is an absolute must to be able to adjust our teams to meet your needs. Flexibility both in the way we arrange our teams according to what the project and customer needs, and flexibility in how we work, where we work, … Although we are flexible, we stick to a solid foundation, our standard approach. Over the years we developed a strong project basis that has proven its worth over 500 times, but since no project is the same, we always add that customized layer on top of it, and that’s what makes the difference.
To add that custom flavor, we have to be able to put ourselves in your position to understand what you need and what’s best for your business, we need to investigate the business itself to fully understand it, we have to get to know your way of working. Because our employees have a lot of experience, not only thanks to the projects they have been involved in over the years but also due to working in different teams with different organizational structures, they are able to quickly assess your way of working and adapt to your needs.
Thriving on cohesive teams
The fact that we work in product teams, ensures cohesiveness. Even if our colleagues work separately on different projects, they can still count on the knowledge of their team. Within these product teams, we support our employees to not stick to their expertise silos. We strive towards a solid combination of profiles who possess excellent knowledge in a specific domain and a high-level skill set in other related fields. That's the power of working with icapps, we have these dedicated, cohesive, and adaptive teams who can mix and bend in the necessary direction to meet your needs. Just like real chameleons.
Blended teams taking the lead
Over the years, we have collaborated with clients in many different ways. We've studied the success rate of these different approaches and this is what it shows: projects with a blended team are 67 percent more successful than other forms of collaboration. But why is that? Well, in any software project, there are certain roles to fulfill, think of a strategist, a designer, a few developers, a product owner, a scrum master, a solution architect,... It's a matter of balancing the customer’s resources with the knowledge of our teams and providing them with the right people to put together a complete team. The strength of blended teams lies within their flexibility, joined expertise; the expertise of our team combined with the business knowledge of the customers’ team, and a project-based way of working.
This combination of both expertise in a particular business, on your end, and expertise in a particular technology on our end, plus the fact that our teams are fully aligned, flexible, and agile, that's where it all comes together, that's the sweet spot of our way of working.
As you can see, we can shake up our approach and add any flavor you want to find the right partnership. The way we adapt our teams to your needs, the way we pull them together and create harmony, that is something we coordinate before the start of each new project, together with you, of course.
