Why invest in the IT sector in Bulgaria?

Bulgaria’s IT sector has developed rapidly in the recent years. According to a report produced by the BOA, the outsourcing industry in Bulgaria is expected to generate 2.5 billion euros and account for 4.3 per cent of the country’s GDP by 2020.

There are a number of factors contributing to that. Some of them, include:

• A highly qualified work force – over 50% of the population has attained a university degree

• Well positioned location wise – 2 hours away from every major European Capital by air

• Very high number of qualified IT professionals and engineers

• Excellent language skills, over 85% of students study English and over 45% of the entire population speaks a foreign language

• Over the past few years there has been robust growth of the Business Process Outsourcing Sector with many foreign companies opening offices – more than 22,000 people are employed by outsourcing companies.

There is now a significant number of large international companies that have chosen Bulgaria as a suitable destination for opening up outsourcing offices. For most of them this turned out to be very lucrative as they have quickly expanded their operations and also moved most of their back office processes in order to further cut costs. This has allowed them to get on with the important task of concentrating in expanding into new markets.

Bulgaria has maintained its high ranking in Europe with regards to outsourcing also because of the alignment between the government, associations and businesses.

Some of the strong points for considering investment in Bulgaria’s IT sector, are:

• geographical location

• developed infrastructure

• real estate equipped to accommodate industry needs

• an educated work force

• taxation

• well developed second tier cities and cost savings.

Considering all of those aspects, Bulgaria’s IT sector seems to have secured itself a bright future. Do not miss your opportunity for making a good business in Bulgaria!

Resources:

World Leader: Bulgarian Outsourcing
Who is Outsourcing to Bulgaria and Why

The positive psychological approach to team work at DeepSource

Everyone, familiar with team work and group dynamics appreciates the value of a positive psychological approach to the team. A lot of research has been done on this topic, all proving the validity of a positive psychological climate, contributing to the overall productivity and general well-being of the team and each individual member of it.

The positive psychological approach affects the so called “work mood”, attitude towards the working process. It also has an effect on communication in the team, on all levels. Both horizontal (amongst members of a certain team or a department – developers, etc.) and vertical lines of structuring of a team, do depend on daily communication and exchange of information. A developer, a team leader, chairman of the board – all of this “chain” is affected by the way people communicate and pass information to each other. The way it is being done is an essential constitutional part of the psychological climate of the team – the sum of all feelings and attitudes of all team members individually and as a group.

The approaches chosen do depend a lot on many factors (number of employees, team structure, company structure and policies regarding employees, etc.). But the key factors here are:

• Understanding of the importance of recognition of each individual team member’s efforts, and emotional investment that they put in their work. Practically, this means that a team leader should take into account the everyday efforts, small steps of progress during a particular project. Acknowledgement of those “small” everyday efforts (which could be expressed verbally by “I see that you have finished this task earlier than the deadline. Good job! This would be of help for the whole team, nicely done!” – for example) does help boost the self-confidence and feeling of satisfaction of each team member.

• Recognizing that the top priority on a subjective level for each individual is first and foremost – MEANING of their work and daily efforts. This factor has a direct impact on work motivation. On a practical scale, this can include having regular talks with the members of the team (a team leader, or a manager could do that), asking specific questions about what drives them, what is their personal mission on this project. Do they feel they are meeting their personal goals? How do they feel in this team? Who supports them the most? Is there something that prevents them from doing their best on a task/project? What could be done to improve things in their specific project? Such questions do help to put into practice a positive psychological approach.

• Providing positive feedback on a regular basis. We all know the old rule “Praise in public, criticize in private”. Well…it does work! Positive feedback is also the tool for expressing understanding and appreciation, ergo – recognition of the person’s efforts. Everyday efforts, a strive for completing a job, finishing an app, or something else, related to a project – all of these need to be supported by the team leader’s opinion. This should be expressed, articulated, told to the employees on a regular bases, should we consider to have this positive psychological approach in place.

Each team member has their own, specific meaning which they seek. One channel this is being expressed by is their work. What we see as end product is exactly this – an end product (an app, a finished website design, etc.). But behind all of this stands the emotional life of a developer, or any team member. What EMOTIONS did they experience during this project? Asking the employees such a question, after an end of the project does help facilitate a feeling of their emotions being recognized. Recognizing this would provide a benefit for all team leaders, who wish to keep their team motivated, achievement-driven and emotionally “ready” for the everyday challenges of a project.

How do we work with clients and how do we develop their products?

The main source of income of DeepSource is our work with clients. That’s why we want to write more about what approaches we use during our work and what is valuable for us as a company.

We consider our work valuable if it satisfies one criteria. The client product is not against common morals – for example we do not work on products containing and/or encouraging, porn, drugs, guns, gambling, hate and political manipulations.

The project chosen receives full dedication and attention from us. The things we expect from the client is to give us a very clear idea of the product what they want to be developed.

During our work we expect from both sides:

• To be transparent to each other in our communication and clear and honest in our intentions
• Testing and giving feedback on a daily-basis

The approach really depends on the client because different clients have different requirements and different needs, but usually we proceed in the following way. If the client wants to work with us we prepare an initial offer. If they agree we sign a two-week contract and receive 50% of the payment in advance. In this way both the client and ourselves can be sure that if we don’t like each other’s work we won’t spend much resources. If we appreciate each other’s work, we continue with a long-term contract.

When we start our work we follow the following steps:

• Based on what the client wants, we make a detailed plan and choose a reliable architecture and the best technological solutions.
• The client will be dedicated an account manager and tech expert who will be by their side from start to end and provide all the support necessary.
• A team of developers and specialists will be attached to their project.

The way we work with the client depends on their needs but if they don’t have any particular requirements we use the approach described below.

We try to keep things as simple as possible because adopting simple and easy to manage processes gives us space to focus on the more important things.

We use a few tools to manage the project we work on.

Asana – This is a project management tool we use to put all tasks the client wants to be developed. The developers and the client have access to it which means that everyone has a clear idea of where are we at the moment and where are we going to.

Google Drive – This is where we document everything related to the project. The client can see the progress of our work in real time.

We have weekly meetings within the team in order to sync the work between each other ,as well as weekly meetings with the client to sync the progress of the work and to receive feedback. We don’t have daily meetings because we try not to overwhelm the development process with lots of meetings which can distract us from the important things. If somebody has questions they can always check Asana or ask their colleagues. If the client or the developer needs a further coordination of our work, they can always initiate an additional meeting.

For the internal needs of the team we use a few additional tools:

Slack – This is a chat platform where developers and people who work on the project can discuss tasks, issues, etc.

Email – For major announcements and discussions we use email communication.

JIRA – This is project management tool used by the developers to manage the tasks in much greater detail.

For all communication channels we try to follow a few very important rules:

• Do not flood the communication channel with pointless discussions. Be specific and short. Do not dive into long talks deviating from the main purpose – “discuss and find a solution”.
• Try not to disturb the work of everyone if you have a question to a particular person.
• Use email communication only if you want to email more than one person.

Releases give the client feedback about whether their software is being developed the way they expect it to be. We try to do releases as often as possible with short summary of what has been done that far. In return we expect feedback from the client.

If the client wants to speak with us they can always visit us at the office but if they want to have an online meeting we use Skype or Google Hangout.

The people who will work on the client project could be people who already work with us or new people can join the company if particular knowledge and skill is required.

Company Culture

Being part of a team with good technical skills is an important principle for developing good products for clients. However, this is not enough for long-term relations with clients and for the developers to be satisfied with what they do and who they do it with. That’s why we would like to present another aspect of the team work, which is often called “company culture”.

The company culture is something we can read about in many books and we have definitely hear about it from entrepreneurs and colleagues. It is considered something important because it is the thing which “builds” a certain environment in the office. And here companies start to adopt different approaches because they “sound good” and put them in documents. Imagine a list of rules – “we are this”, “we do this, but we don’t do that”. Everybody in the company is expected to follow the company culture as a set of behaviour rules which they have to learn by reading long and sometimes boring documents. And we all know that in practice nobody likes that.

For us company culture is precisely our approach to doing our job with other people in order to develop good products, our aim to be satisfied of what we do and to have constructive communication with our colleagues.

Companies often adopt different rules and approaches which are supposed to make our work more efficient and people to be satisfied but sometimes this doesn’t work. As human beings we tend to put aside the rules which sound artificial to us and we embrace only those of them which resonate with something in us.

Basically what happens is that we reject the things which the outer environment tries to apply to us if we don’t have the feeling that they will make us more satisfied with our work. That’s the moment when we put them aside and we apply our own approaches – the way we comprehend how things “should” work. The result is that the team and the company becomes a mixture of “cultures” because everybody contributes with their own share – the way each of us thinks how things “should” work.

We think that people work better together when the company culture matches with basic human values and desires. That’s why we decided to define our values.

Speaking of team work there is a phenomenon called “ego and desire to be more than others”. I am sure that everyone of us have seen people who tried to show with their full energy that they were better than you in what you did at work. Usually these kind of people concentrate important information in themselves and they don’t share it with others. What they do is to build an artificial position of “I know how and I know better than you”. Later they speculate with this by satisfying their deep desire to be something more and to be noticed and by doing so, they simply cover their low self-esteem or incompetence.

The way you can recognise such people is:

• They keep for themselves information crucial for the team work.
• They always complain how others don’t do their job and therefore how good they are at doing it.

• Make sure all of the information you acquire is well documented, up-to-date and accessible
• Communicate with your team actively
• If the clients ask you tough questions, let other team members answer them, as well
• Participate in decisions about matters for which you are competent
• If you’re not competent for a decision, involve other team members in it
• Be a generator of valuable improvements and empower others to do the same
• If someone in the team starts taking too much responsibility, talk them into sharing some of it with you and other team members
• Be empathetic and help people feel important
• Teach others by example

Nowadays technologies change so fast compared to a 100 years ago, that we need to educate ourselves and adopt new skills constantly. Only by doing so we can be better in what we do.

Knowledge has an interesting quality. When we share it and discuss it with other people, it multiplies because new ideas and concept arise. Fortunately nowadays there are people who are willing to share their knowledge otherwise information wouldn’t be so easily accessible.

This is why we value the desire of people to learn, to develop skills and to share it with others.

When we express an opinion or share an idea we don’t say it simply because we want to create noise. We do it because we have something to say and we share it because we need to be heard and we need to discuss it. The opinion and the idea itself might be wrong but this doesn’t mean that our intentions are bad. From that perspective it is valuable to have people around us who can listen and would appreciate the same from us.

I like the phrase “If we leave a space empty, it won’t stay empty for long. Something will fill it in”. This is very true for the way we see the world. If we have lack of information on a particular topic, our mind will try to find the information and if it can not, it will produce it. The produced information might be wrong but at least it will have some explanation about what is going on.

But if we invent “information” in order to fill in “an empty gap” the nature of this information will be dictated by our inner feeling which sometimes (unfortunately) involve fear, worries and so on.

What does this mean for the team work? This means that if we do not communicate our real intention to others there is a high chance to free some space for rumors, fears, gossips. All of them are a slow and silent killer of the team and it generates even more fear and dissatisfaction.

This is why we value clear communication of our intentions and work.

The feeling of satisfaction when we work in a team doesn’t come only from the fact that we have done our job but also from the fact that the people around us have done their job they have promised to do. The source of this satisfaction is that we know that we work with people whose words are transformed into action. This is why we value one simple sentence -“Get the job done”. This is the way we show respect towards ourselves and towards others.

We believe that all of the above said is not simply a set of rules but basic human values which we appreciate in others and in order, but also they could serve as a guideline for our own behaviour in a team environment.