SWIS

Lemberg team met SWIS during Drupaljam:XL 2019 in the Netherlands. Matthias Snoei, the company’s founder, hadn't had any outsourcing experience before and struggled to find local employees. Lemberg offered to work via a project-based agreement prior to switching to the dedicated team model of cooperation. The client was unsure about cooperation with a Ukrainian digital agency due to remote management, cultural differences, and language barriers. That is why we took small steps first to demonstrate our reliability and establish effective communication.

As the old adage goes: great things start from small beginnings! Eventually, our client was satisfied with the performance of Lemberg Drupal development team and decided to continue our collaboration on bigger projects, including Amsterdam Bereikbaar, Energie Participatie, Bouwen Aan Rotterdam, and Sigra. Lemberg engineers used Drupal and the Vue.js framework for their development. Bing van Moorsel, SWIS director of operations, helped our team adjust to remote cooperation and ensured effective communication between Lemberg and SWIS engineers. 

Although everything went smoothly in terms of web development, our engineers had to overcome the language barrier challenge. Internal communication at SWIS was mainly held in Dutch, and the client’s team translated it into English for our engineers. However, sprint planning meetings, which took place every two weeks, couldn't be translated because they were held verbally. To fix this issue, SWIS is planning to prepare task descriptions for medium and large scale projects in English.

Another essential task was to establish effective cooperation between SWIS and Lemberg employees. We aimed to make it transparent and competition-free so that the teams didn’t have any emotional communication barriers. Our account managers chose a creative way to make it happen. They set up an online meeting with SWIS and Elevated Third, an American digital agency that has a dedicated team with Lemberg as well. Elevated Third shared how they managed to establish effective and friendly communication between the local and remote teams. Read more about our cooperation with Elevated Third. 

Our client then proceeded to explain to their local developers that the company was receiving too much work to handle internally. SWIS didn't want to put excessive pressure on their developers and cause stress because of critical loads, so they decided to hire additional workforce for some projects. Lemberg therefore serves as an "amplifier" that allows local developers to work at a normal pace.

As a result of effective communication between SWIS and Lemberg, as well as our engineers’ great performance, we continue our cooperation, delivering projects to SWIS clients. We have been able to effectively eliminate the concerns that arose at the start, and are now enjoying a smooth collaboration.