This week marked the completion of the first year of a long project we are undertaking for Staffcare – a British company that produces software that communicates and configures employee benefits. It is our largest and most complex project to date. We expect to complete it by the end of the month, making it roughly a 12-month project. In effect this work comprised 20 sub-projects running in parallel, further complicated by the fact that several of them did not start on time and therefore this final stage of the project is heavily loaded.

Despite the size and complexity of the project, the fundamental success factors have remained the same as they would on a smaller project, just further amplified. Communication is still the single most important element of our project. With so many sub-projects running in parallel, and the team located in two countries, communication has been vital to both successful day-to-day working and to overall project management. The project team is divided into smaller sub-teams with shared leadership – two lead developers are located in UK, whereas the team leaders are in Poland. As well as ad-hoc email and IM communication, team leaders and developers Skype daily and the Polish team has visited Staffcare’s offices in the UK regularly. Flexibility has also been vital to our project. To the original Staffcare team in Gliwice we quickly added 15 extra developers and 8 quality assurance engineers to work on the project as necessary. This has not increased Staffcare’s long-term cost base- these are ‘on-tap’ engineers that were added and removed at very short notice as the customer’s requirements changed.

One year is certainly a big milestone both for Future Processing and the Staffcare employees working on this project. When we started it in autumn 2011, the nearly13-month finishing deadline seemed so far away. Now the project is nearly complete. It has led us to create the joint leadership structure I alluded to above – shared between Poland and the UK. This structure, coupled with the dedicated Future Processing developers, QA engineers, business analysts and project managers who all now have a solid understanding of the Staffcare business and software, will ensure that subsequent work for Staffcare (once this project has finished) will now be completed more quickly.