Near shoring with Ciklum

at NZZ

23.10.2012 NZZ.ch 1

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Multi-Channel Publishing

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Innovation: HTML5 app with responsive design

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Mobile: Content on any mobile device

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Digital Subscription: Innovation leader in German CH

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• Two distributed Scrum teams

– Organized as feature teams

– Mixed setup with Swiss and Ukrainian developers

– 13 developers in total

– Located in Zürich and Kiev

• Dedicated QA Team

– Two automated testers

– Three manual testers

– Entirely located in Kiev

Who we are

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How we do it: Scrum by the book

• 2010: Very small team in Zürich.

• Most software development was done by external

service providers were we made incredible bad

experiences.

• Insourcing and nearshoring became strategic for

NZZ‘s need to grow in the digital market.

• June 2011: initial start point with first team in Kiev;

two developers and one testers.

• May 2012: massive growth to 22 people in Zürich

and Kiev

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How it all began

• Personal encounter is essential

– Everyone in Kiev travels to Zürich; at least twice a year.

– Team leaders from Zürich travels to Kiev regularly.

• Esteem is of major importance.

• A good video conferencing system is a must.

• The meaning of work-life balance is quite different between the two countries.

• It is a big benefit to have know-how „in-house“.

Lessons we have learned, part 1

• Handling such a development power results in a

bottleneck on project management side.

• Well defined and continously improved processes

are essential.

• Choosing accurate, but not too many, tools that

support distributed collaboration helps a lot.

• For rapid development high-level quality assurance

is utterly important.

Lessons we have learned, part 2

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• Hyperproductive Scrum-Teams

• State of the art development process

• State of the art quality assurance process

• Extremely high job satisfaction (9.8/10 Ciklum‘s report)

• Zero fluctuation of employees

• Happy business and workers

The results

JIRA: Created vs Resolved Issues Report

Time: before NZZ.ch relaunch

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Thank you for your attention.

Christian Stettler

Projektleiter

Neue Zürcher Zeitung AG, Falkenstrasse 11, CH-8021 Zürich

Tel: +41 44 258 12 75 | Fax: +41 44 258 13 28

christian.stettler@nzz.ch | www.nzz.ch