Customer has started not-for-profit business in 2009 to support sponsorship for charity & fundraising events. Customer was looking at providing an online platform to fundraisers and charities organisations which would help them raise money not just in events but also offline.

They partnered with Arrk Group for the design and development of their website, in a aggressive nine-month window to coincide with their business commitments.

After successful launch of the web platform, Customer decided to maintain and enhance their in-house IT capacity and continued with that for a few years. However, as the busines expanded and the demand grew, they realized they did not have enough capacity. They acknowledged the need to engage with a right-sized vendor who can understand their need and provide them with best ASM capabilities in a cost-efficient way. They wanted a team who was self-driven, self-organised and could provide best development services and consultation, whenever required. And who better than their original partner to turn to.

That is when Arrk stepped in and provided Customer with the much-desired extension to their IT Team over the course of next few years, being responsible for web support, maintenance, and future developments.

In order to support their business goals and priorities better, Customer needed a team structure aligned with their business segments namely Retention, Distribution and GDPR. A delivery model wherein they could have few scrum teams, consisting of resources from both sides, some of them spreading across whereas others dedicated to a specific team, but with certain degree of flexibility to move them around, depending upon the need and priority. Basically, a scrum of scrums wherein all the teams were meant to be jointly supervised by the delivery leads from both sides, but a single product manager and a single technical architect.

After careful consideration, it was agreed to have three scrum teams, one each for a business segment. Whilst each team consisted of designated programming and test resources, few roles such as the scrum master, product owner, tech lead and UX designer were common across them to ensure consistency in functional, technical, and user experience implementation. As anticipated, the first couple of Sprints were little chaotic while the team members were acquiring knowledge and getting to know each other. And as anticipated yet again, it was only a matter of time that the team dynamics kicked in and the dust stared settling down.

Excellent collaboration between Arrk & Customer’s IT teams resulted into several projects and tasks of varied size and duration. The list included not just functional development work such as Custom Codes, Corporates, Printable Reports, Bulk Donations, there were tasks important from technical improvement perspective too such as properties internalization, move from old frameworks (e.g. Struts) to contemporary ones (Spring), and investigation and recommendations towards underlying technology stack upgrade.