The ASPgems Difference

Never in my life before, I have been engaged in anything like this. Yes, I have been in many interesting companies, and projects that I really liked, that made me feel an appreciated contributor, and where I have had fantastic people around. I feel lucky of been able to say that I have enjoyed almost any minute of the time I have dedicated to work since my first job until now.

What is then so special to me about working and being a partner at ASPgems? It is something that touches my heart, but I am unsure if I can put it in words, anyway I want to try:

• The first thing that comes to my mind is a feeling around ownership. Being a shareholder is good, because you participate and contribute in the key decisions that are relevant to the group, to our future, to what we do, or what we choose not to do. But it is a lot more than that. It is the shared ownership of our view of the software world, and the so many things on it that are necessary to fix. The shared ownership of our mission to use the technology, the methodology that we have developed, our brains our hearts, our passion and our effort to make possible for our customers to do it. It is a feeling of ownership that goes beyond equity and financial concepts and it has to do much more with the ownership of your feelings and what you do.

• My next big feeling is around transparency and being honest. This is something that I really loved since the first serious talks that we had about me joining. And after more than one year it is still something that gives me confidence. It provides all of us with continuous feedback about what we do right or wrong, it allows us to have always the right expectations and to adjust them when it is needed. There is no politics, not a hidden agenda and no imposed decisions. Any non-confidential information (we have NDA's with most of our customers) is shared all the time through our internal social networks and shared repositories. We conduct After Action Review meetings each time we finalize a project or an important task, and we do it with all honesty, recognizing all the things that we need to improve and also the ones that we need to reinforce, and we share them with all the team.

• Another big feeling is about the respect for everyone's personal lives, and the fact that taking care of our children, practicing sport or contributing to our local community is having also a positive impact in our productivity at work. We don't set up times where our physical presence is required in the office. We do visit customers (either physically or by videoconference), we do collaborate in projects all the time, but we use all the tools at our hands to be productive, to be effective, and to allow us not to be far from our family and our community while we make our best contribution to our work and to our customer's projects.  

• Passion is a key thing. We strongly believe that Motivation is a key factor to our performance. We are passionate about software development. We have a vision about how the digital technologies are opening a whole world of new possibilities in the IT industry, and we are passionate about being a very active player on that.  For this reason we don't try to take every request that comes to us. We choose very carefully the projects we decide to work in. We need to do the check as a team regarding if that particular project fits within our values and our passion, and in this process we give preference to those that we like more. By doing that we try as much as we can to make sure that we work in what we love and  we share the ownership of the project with our customer. As a result of this we are confident that we provide the best possible outcome to them.

• Our goal and our aim is to help our customers to take advantage of the IT, and in particular of the so many still unused possibilities that the Digital Technologies and the Agile methodology are offering to improve the way how their employees and customers work and collaborate, to do better their business, to reduce their time to market, to make easier for the customers to buy their products or to use their services,  to build more efficient processes, or to be more socially responsible.

• We are continuously trying to learn new things, and to find ways to do things better, as this is what the customers that work with us expect from us to do. We are in a process of continuous learning, continuously trying new things. This search around innovation is in our DNA and it is also part of our passion and our commitment to what we do.

But the key thing thing what is behind all que qualities that I have found in ASPgems and that are making me so excited about this project is the PEOPLE. The people who work in the company, who have created, built and developed it over the years. The people, my colleagues, who share the values, the culture, the passion and the enthusiasm. The people who form such an engaging and supportive community, the people I am so happy to work with, to be with and to share my effort, my passion and my energy. The people with whom I try to make everyday my personal contribution to make better projects.