What made us do it and how are we different?
Before we founded the company, I went through some interesting projects. Yes, we are fortunate that there are many to choose from in this industry. I've tried both corporate and startup environments. It still wasn't the right fit.
As my experience with agile projects grew, I found that it wasn't so bad. No, it's actually great.
I met a lot of interesting and cool people on my last corporate project. The project had quite an interesting scope and we tried to go all out. I was lucky enough to join the project at a time when it was fresh through the Agile Transformation. I had been raised by "waterfall" for most of my life, so I was easily defensive. As my experience with the Agile project grew, I found that it wasn't so bad. No, it's actually great. I went through the scrum.org certification and found that it was the way to go. And lo and behold, she's only done the transformation at a certain level, and what's plaguing us is the perpetual clash with "waterfall" management.
But the team was absolutely amazing and it's also quite understandable that in a company this big, switching management into a completely different mindset is not going to be easy. Another blow to the project was the arrival of a completely incompetent product owner. But this was an internal employee of the company, so a person above all the external excel entries (yes the entry was us) that make up the product.
And here came the last straw. A working relationship is always based on someone supplying work and getting paid for it. It's good practice that both the work and the financial reward arrive on time.
As you have understood from previous writing, we were supplied as an external capacity on the project by another fairly large company. And here came the final straw. The working relationship is always based on someone delivering work and getting paid for it. It is good practice that both the work and the financial reward arrive on time. Yes, any situation can happen and you can just pick up the phone, email or whatever with the information that the money will arrive on the 15th, if at all. Probably no one would have a problem in the event of such an outage, as long as any communication took place. What do you think happened? Despite assurances that it wouldn't happen again, the situation repeated itself. Again, with no prior communication and no apology.
Enough!
My colleague Jiri Libich and I have been thinking for some time about going it alone. Everything I have described here has led us to the conclusion that we must do it better. We decided to learn from everything that led us to start AppTim. From the money we saved, we decided to change it.
We're looking for projects for people, not people for projects
We were joined by skilled colleagues who are on the same wave as me and Jirka. We were also lucky to get a unique chance as a team. We managed to get the development of a search component built on Elastic Stack. We have a nice atmosphere in the office. Everything can be solved and thanks to the current market situation we manage to get agile projects, built on modern technologies and with great people on the other side. We always pay our colleagues on time. Oh, and it really works remotely. We still like to meet in the office because it's a chance to have a really good lunch together 😀 and not only that.
We enjoy our work and we won't back down from what led us to start it.
We'd love to welcome you to the fold.
Zdeněk Musil, CEO & AppTime team