The customer is always right. Right?

Welcome to our new series in which we'll dive deep into the topics that pique our employees' interest - from various success and project stories, and technical insights, to challenges they overcome on the daily. You'll get to explore their point of view and catch a glimpse of the "behind the scenes" action.

Find a comfy spot, and unwind with us over the next couple of minutes.

My friend Marko and I are crammed on a flight across the Atlantic, having a ridiculous feud with the person in front of us over her seat position, while keeping our minds away from the scary meeting ahead. We're both tall guys, and even with the seats upright, it feels like we're doing a circus act trying to fit our legs. But this lady in front of us takes the cake! She keeps pushing her seat towards us, trying to lift her legs on the wall like she's auditioning for Cirque du Soleil. I mean, come on, we're not contortionists!

Now, let's rewind a bit.?

A couple of weeks earlier, Endava got a request from a Boston-based healthcare startup. They wanted an offer from us to build a web app to streamline their campaigns and reduce costs. Having limited experience in the domain, we refrained from sending a generic “3-month scrum team” offer. Instead, we proposed a two-week discovery workshop before either party commits to anything. Luckily, it worked!?

Having landed safely, there we were, a couple of thirty-something Eastern Europeans, freezing in a cold New England December morning, finding our way to the client offices through a menacing forest of buildings, familiar big neon tech logos looking down on us. Unintimidated, we boldly go where no Endavan has gone before and march straight into a conference room, full of our new client’s executives. We calmly lay our plan down: interview everyone, share interim findings by the end of the week; then, zero in on the challenge and wrap up the second week with a scope, cost, and time estimate. Fortunately, even in the heartland of MIT, companies remain blissfully unaware of your internal screams. Limited to their natural senses only, the CEO and the entire entourage fully commit to our plan, charmed by our new clothes and a natural air of confidence!?

Dozens of interviews and late-night sessions later, there we were, on a Friday afternoon, in front of the same audience, explaining what their company really does. Really.?

You see, you can think of a company like a living being, with employees forming its cells and organs. We like to anthropomorphize things, so you’d usually imagine this creature having a central nervous system and a brain, consciously deciding, and acting in its best interest. “The client wants this”. “The client says that”. Wrong. A company is more like an octopus, with tentacles independently dancing together in a sea of changing currents. But unlike the real thing, the company only has years to evolve, compared to the octopus’ millennia, and so the dance to avoid predators, feed, and grow is proportionally less gracious. Imagine an octopus with a random number of tentacles, each made of a different tissue, wobbling its way around an aqua park, high on seaweed. Yup. No wonder they live less than 18 years on average. And if you’re lucky, you’re talking to one of those tentacles only, but if not, maybe a lesser part of its anatomy.

?Anyway, during our interviews, it was crystal clear that everyone had an impressive grasp of their roles. However, not a soul grasped the full scope of the company's daily operations, orchestrating automated phone interviews across the entirety of the US and Canada. The delighted "aahs" and "oohs" that followed our presentation of the newly constructed event-driven process chain diagram validated our sketch of the company’s anatomy.?

Armed with this new knowledge and confidence, we ask the CEO to provide data on time and the relative cost of every employee. Being an Excel guru at a startup, she pivots out everything we need in minutes. We apply this to our process diagram – grow every step of the process proportionally to the time and cost. To top it off, we highlighted areas impacted by the web app they asked us to build.?

Turns out, even if we automated those areas to cost 0 dollars and seconds, it’d still not be enough to save the 25% they were hoping for. However, we’ve unearthed a couple of surprising inefficiencies – laborious and not-so-glamorous work taking place behind the scenes, that no one considered improving as this was “the way”. Funnily enough, just by talking to everybody, we were able to massively improve an analyst’s workflow – the feature he needed the most was already there, but due to mystical ways tribal knowledge flows through the company, he ended up learning about it from us!?

Fast forward to half a year later, after stand-up ovations at our final discovery meeting, and there we were, at a restaurant near our Belgrade office, accompanied by a crew of a few dozen. Our shorts and t-shirts are not doing a great job of cooling us on the hot summer afternoon, so we complement them with cold pints. Brave men and women of Silver Surfers, Silver Bullets, Quicksilvers, Silver Sables, and Silver Samurai, last standing on the account. We’re recounting war stories from many different work streams delivered – only partially asked for, many more discovered along the way!?

As the night creeps in, we decide to hijack the karaoke machine and torture our poor hosts, singing together into the early morning hours.?

Thank you to our Delivery Manager Borivoje Kova? for his contribution!