Many companies have difficulty adjusting their development processes with engineers working from home. So we want to share our experience with you, and we hope you find it useful.
If you are curious about keeping the productivity of agile developers working remotely, you may wish to check our webinar hosted in May 2020.
Mihai Popa: Hello, and welcome to this Cegeka webinar; I am Mihai Popa with Cegeka Romania, I'll be your host for today, and with people working from home these days, even when we will go into a slight relaxation period, remote working and working in isolation will still remain the reality for most of us. Regardless of this working in isolation still enterprises expect to obtain the same results because all companies need to preserve output and revenues.
We've been working with remote teams for quite a while now, so that should not have taken us as a company by surprise with things in Romania and then expanding to other countries like Belgium of course, Bosnia, Russia or the Republic of Moldova. Yet, having these teams also dissipated with every single developer working on their own has brought new challenges to the table, and this is why we wanted to share with you the challenges the solutions and the remaining question marks that we've been facing; this is why our webinar today is about keeping productivity in remote agile development teams.
Now in the right part of your screen you will see the chat window; I was mentioning a little bit before that during the presentation we have quite a few attendees, so you're going to be able to ask any questions which we’ll be sure to address at the end of the meeting.
Now I will introduce the speakers for today's webinar, and we have Elke de Mits who is a Project Leader with Cegeka Belgium, we have Tom Hendrickx who is an Agile Project Manager with Cegeka Belgium, we have Emina Dzuzdanovic who is a Project Leader with Cegeka Bosnia, and we have Andrei Pavel who is a Business Unit Manager for the agile development division with Cegeka Romania.
So, hi guys.
Andrei Pavel: Hello everyone thanks for joining.
Mihai Popa: And I'm going to start with probably the most pressing question that I have for you today.
What has been the most striking change that you've seen when the COVID situation stroke, and when you needed to start working with individually remoted engineers, compared to what they used to be before? Whoever wants to pick this up?
Tom Hendrickx: So, in our organization we are well distributed anyway, because we have multiple teams working on multiple locations; I think the most striking thing that we needed to change was the human interaction that you normally do at the coffee machine or that you do while sitting next to each other in the same room, that needed to be replaced with explicit meetings, such as a an extra daily stand-up, an extra team-drink online to make sure that the close connections between the team members are kept. Of course, since we were already distributed so not only these two were already included, we can explain later which method we used to achieve which goal and to ensure that everybody kept on feeling part of the team. That there are no people feeling isolated from the rest of the organization. That couple of initiatives mainly grew from the teams
themselves as I already mentioned: team drinks, extra stand-ups; another thing was working out loud, that means while working you make very explicit what you do towards your team members, to make transparent what you do when so that everybody is keeping the same place. It's true for me this was the most biggest thing that we needed to adapt to.
Elke de Mits: And for what I've noticed in the teams also is to be aware that you are calling people at their homes so at the beginning, you see for me I'm calling from my living room and at the beginning people were a bit “oh, no, you will see my children” or “my husband will pass by the video camera” and we just talked about it and asked a little bit more questions about “how are you dealing with working from home” and “where are you sitting at this moment” and just make a little bit more connection with your team members about their home situation things that you otherwise would do a lot less if you're all working at the same office.
Emina Dzuzdanovic: It is very important that everyone knows your transparency, meaning that working from home does not mean that you're available at all time. But you're available as same as your office hours; that means that you're really there and not going around the house and so on, and that it's also easier for the people so that when the time comes and you're not working anymore that you can close your laptop and do whatever you do in your home.
Andrei Pavel: Indeed, so from my side there hasn't been really something striking working from home and also as the other colleagues mentioned, I think it's also due to the way we you we used to work even until the COVID and either that we collaborated between teams in Romania from locations in Bucharest or Iasi, with other teams and divisions across the group in the Netherlands or in Belgium, or even with customers located in different parts of the world; starting from the US to UK we did work remotely, but what maybe surprised me a little bit is the fact that extended remote work has brought us more closer together and maybe I didn't expect that; but it really felt like that and also looking, okay, your husband or your spouse is passing through the camera view, where the colleagues see the background and then you also go a little bit in the personal area and that's actually quite nice; I think it contributed to tighten a bit our relationships and we have more discussions even maybe informal ones or with the touch of personal area so, yes it was to me a little bit counterintuitive but I would say it's the good part of this isolation and the COVID situation.
Mihai Popa: But coming back to what you've just said, would you say that there were colleagues who were opposed to working remotely or who protested and would have liked to keep on coming to the office?
Andrei Pavel: I think the vast majority understood the gravity of the situation and the need to work in isolation. Of course I think we all missed the sudden interruption of our face-to-face discussions and the social aspect of it, and of course maybe a part of us including myself still wanted to maybe come to the office and discuss face-to-face, but I think in the end we all understood that this is something that we don't get to play with and for the benefit of us all and the benefit of our employees we need to stick by the rules imposed by the governments and then by the companies.
Mihai Popa: And now because our theme is productivity, how would you describe productivity levels once the COVID situation started as opposed to the ones before? Of course some may object that it is difficult to measure software productivity because this can be subjective, but still, once you look at the outcomes then possibly it becomes a little bit more transparent and yet I keep my question. How would you describe the productivity levels in the new situations as compared to the one before?
Tom Hendrickx: Well, in our organization, we measure of course the productivity by measuring every two weeks because we work in two week cycles, how much new functionalities we can deliver at a set quality of course and if we look at the metrics, I see that the productivity has increased compared to before the COVID crisis; I think that's something to be linked to the fact that increased focus is possible while working from home, we also went through research with the other teams in the company and there the majority of the teams indicate that what productivity has remained the same or improved. I think that if you reorganize yourselves and make use of tools to help you maintain communication I think it's perfectly doable to be productive, independent, working remotely.
Mihai Popa: Andrei? Thoughts?
Andrei Pavel: To be really honest, Mihai, it's related also to what I mentioned previously, in the fact that we already kind of were working in this distributed way but of course we extend it even further, and what we noticed is that the productivity is overall on the same level with some spikes in the positive trend here and now, this also comes from our teams of course the team leaders themselves but also from the customers and the project that we are running. So from a productivity perspective I would say that things are at least the same and this is at least……on my side I haven't seen any drop in productivity that is I don't know due to the CORONA situation It's still a valid question I think is the situation that could happen I don't know for over the the next couple of months, is it sustainable?
Mihai Popa: Yes that was my next question - you anticipated well - that's exactly what I want to ask. I mean should we all just stay in isolation and make everything nice and merry?
Andrei Pavel: I think it's a very hard question to ask to me personally I think on the long term maybe a couple of months down the road we might be impacted by this isolation - especially the isolation I think is the right word - and I think starting slowly to come to work would be the way to go forward, but again it's hard to say because we've never faced this situation before and I'm also curious what my colleagues think.
Tom Hendrickx: To me it is also very unsure, because this is something that we are not used to, but we're starting up the exercise in our project organization on how to move next, I think what we have seen is for day-to-day work, so normal development sprints - in terms of productivity that works - but it is a little bit harder in relation to customers to have strategic meetings about the future of the project, about which direction we are going to take, that is something I would like to do a little bit more face-to-face, so maybe having those workshops is something that we can do until I start doing it again face to face.
Another thing is a social aspect of things is to connect the people to each other, I personally miss the face-to-face interaction with a couple of my colleagues so what we are doing right now is investigating how are we going to organize ourselves for the next months, which things are we going to do again face-to-face, where can we continue to do it as we were doing but that is something very impredictable, we have to learn that as we do which things can be done better again face-to-face.
Elke de Mits: And something else to add to what Thomas is saying, for me the knowledge sharing between the different teams is very difficult to handle now because, in the normal situation for instance, I work in Gent and we sit next to three or four other teams; we are all working agile on different projects, but you learn things from hearing out how they handle a sprint planning; they do that like this or we do a demo like this maybe they can learn something from us, and the connection with the other teams I missed; now, you can try things with tools but you don't really know anymore what other teams are doing at this moment so you're really on a small island with your project and that's something for the long term, I think we will miss the connection.
Mihai Popa: Would the ability of developers to work independently be impacting less on senior developers than it would a junior that needs constant guidance and advice?
Emina Dzuzdanovic: Yes, but that also can be managed with remote pair programming so, of course it's not the same as you if you were in the office but it can be handled. But here I also think the biggest challenge that we had was with the client as Tom already stated.
Because you all know when you are communicating with the client and he of course if there are some people that usually prefer face-to-face; sometimes, when you have a meeting then if it happens on their premises on-site you also start talking about different things, different new possibilities, new possible projects and all what you call it “coffee machine talk” - it all happens there. Now you don't have that now everything that you want you need to make it explicit and you need to keep your focus and you need to arrange a meeting for everything. Nothing happens spontaneously now and that's the biggest challenge that we have right now.
I think for the beginning the productivity on the team level was not impacted and the business that we had with the clients was also constant and stable, but maybe the opportunities for new projects that are ahead, that is now being challenged.
Mihai Popa: Something which is very interesting, the remote pair programming. How do they do that - is someone looking directly into someone else's window while they code?
Emina Dzuzdanovic: Yes, so you have a variety of tools available for that, I think that we are using TeamViewer, but it's really not about the tools; it's a practice that we usually do even in the office, so pair programming is one of the biggest advantage that you have so that's how you knowledge transfer from a more experienced software developer to a more junior one and of course you can do it remotely. So, it's just one person sharing his screen and the other one looks at him typing and he's of course thinking out loud and it's a way of getting things done but also learning in the meantime.
Tom Hendrickx: What is important for me is, it’s easier when you are forced to work remote to skip on your practice event that you believe in and so in our case agile practices I think in times that you work remotely, and so you need to make sure that you adhere to your principles and practices and sometimes that means that you use a tool to make that possible or that you have to find a way to still keep on doing that but even in these periods we follow our own principles and ways of working that we believe in and we know leads to good results. So, there are a couple of practices which appeared that we were able to keep on doing.
Emina Dzuzdanovic: That’s about pair programming, but something that Elke mentioned that now cross team knowledge sharing does not even exist because there are not a lot of interactions between them, but sessions and workshops could be useful when a team has something achieved, a new technology was set into the project, integrated, it will be useful that a session is made or a workshop where other teams can learn something.
Mihai Popa: Well, given that we've been for about two months in isolation, probably most of the projects that we were working on were already in course and set on a certain course and Emina at least you I know we are working on a pretty large project which is probably well underway. But I was wondering what difference it makes when a project needs to start with teams in isolation and how does that affect the foundations period when everything is set in place. Did you have a chance to give that a thought?
Emina Dzuzdanovic: Yes thank you, not even a thought, it's something that's happened since the beginning of the COVID situation; I knew the project started and two of our new team members and one older that was there from before, they started working on a mini-project in the constructive landscape so to say. The challenge was of course introducing the new team members to the other customer teams, because usually as though we do work remotely when someone new comes into the company, we prefer them to at least in a short period of time go to Belgium and meet their team members, so that you put a face to a name of course, now that of course was not possible but we did make sure that we transparently communicate to the customer – we introduced them, everything was done remotely; it was a challenge and it was a challenge also for them because they were two juniors without experience. It was very unusual for them, but we made sure that every day we talked to them and see if they have any impediments, if they have any technical problems, anything that stands in their way will be removed. On the other hand, regarding the customer, we also encouraged more communication between them of course, I'm repeating myself but transparency really is everything here.
Mihai Popa: So, we're starting to see some questions here. Robert is asking: I’m not very familiar with Cegeka’s development practices. We're just customers, do you use any specific online tools for remote collaboration and project organization developing sprint ceremonies? How do you use them and how do you onboard new colleagues? I think this is a very valid set of questions here.
Tom Hendrickx: Yeah so, and without going into all the details of how we work in our projects, we are working with multiple agile scrum teams, that means that we work in sprints indeed far as two-week sprints and we work in close collaboration with the customer to define what we are going to do after the sprint to show what we have done. So, if you ask about tools for collaboration and project organization, one of the tools that we already had, because we were already a remote distance team before. [One tool] is Jira, I don't know if that's familiar to you, but it's a tool that we use for project tracking so in between, you make a scrum board in which we visualize what we are doing in sprints, so each team that works in our project as one of these boards the goal is to make transparent what we are doing, what the state of this area are blocked, what needs to move and so on. Then for really short communication and to give status updates we use Slack that's like is a messaging tool where you can send messages or do short video calls with each other, or you can create channels in which information is shared. And we have other tools like Microsoft Teams or Skype for Business and so on for storing information in Microsoft Teams or for calling remotely. Of course, we depend heavily on remote calls at the moment. And then we have a couple of very specific tools that in our teams we do at the end of each sprint a retrospective to see how we did what we can improve and so on, then is how to be organized remotely, there are tools that support remote retrospective. What we also like to do is make things visual when we have meetings, drawings or use virtual post-its and so on, a good tool for that is Miro.
Mihai Popa: Excuse me, Tom would you mind naming those tools that you use for
Retrospectives? Oh, it’s Miro.
Emina Dzuzdanovic: Right; and Funretro.
Tom Hendrickx: Indeed, so these are the tools that support collaboration, interactive online meetings and so on I think we have good experiences with other tools.
Elke de Mits: I think when you're working remote the most important thing for your tools is that everybody can collaborate not only one person who's sharing his screen but like for instance Miro or Funretro or other tools if everybody can join and just do things during the meeting that's a lot more than someone is sharing a screen and after one half of an hour you lose your focus, so it's cool to take people back to your meeting and ask them something to do during the meeting.
Tom Hendrickx: I think that is expected that when you create an online meeting is to create equality between the participants. So, if everybody is remote then in between those kind of tools you can make sure that everybody can participate; they can contribute to a later topic.
Elke de Mits: In my team we also use Google Hangouts during the whole constructive project, but we have seven or six hangouts and in my team; we know that we have one hangout for our team and if somebody has a question he can go to the room and check if there's somebody else to just ask the question that you would do at the office and to to ask your neighbour a question, that's always easy, that's always open hangout and you can just go over there and maybe you find a colleague or just short ask in Slack “hey can we meet at the hangout” and then they meet and even if it's a question for two minutes it can help working together.
Andrei Pavel: So, indeed, I think from a requirements management perspective, JIRA is the most common tool that we use, it's not the only one, though. We look at the needs and then also select the tools and not vice-versa, of course, but it can also mean that we use any tools from Microsoft like VSTS; it's also integrated with the CICD pipeline or building that CICD or Jenkins but these are tools that to be really honest we already used maybe from a communication perspective again, due to the way we work remotely between divisions or between cities or countries; we used a lot Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, which seems to be more stable from what we noticed.
I think one of the biggest challenges and one of the things that we kind of missed was the discussion that you have during the retrospectives. When I think that's the moment at the end of the sprint where you ask a very open question. “what went well” and “what didn't go well” and then the human interaction face to face is kind of important, of course there are tools around it which work but it's pretty challenging to replace that human interaction during the retrospective with only a tool, but they do work. Maybe another tool that we used and it's very nice is Mentimeter, where you can do ad-hoc all types of surveys and it's really nice, also... if you don't ad-hoc a survey then you can also have a conversation about that specific topic on the spot right then and there and that's actually really nice.
Mihai Popa: Ok thank you very much, I hope this also covers Sorin’s question if you need to dig into more details, Sorin, please let us know; and we have a question from Cliff who says: “You haven't said anything relating to productivity that is specific to agile methods, do all of your findings and recommendations apply to all methods as for waterfall or is one agile method more productive than another agile when working remotely for example scrum versus extreme programming?
Tom Hendrickx: I think for me the hardest one to really answer based on my experiences let's say, in our project we use scrum and XP practices together, Scrum is more about how we organize our teams and the team of teams because we have multiple teams, XP is more of the engineering practices that we follow let's say so we do both of them. From experience I cannot say one method is more productive than another, because we only have concrete experiences with our own but I think it's an assumption but I think the method doesn't really matter - there's some communication between people, so as long as you make sure that happens I think it shouldn't matter too much, that is an assumption I didn't test it and we only work with one.
I think a good waterfall project demands a lot of interaction and I think a project in any way Agile, Waterfall - fails or succeeds based on interaction. I'm convinced that if projects don't succeed it is most likely because of communication and clarity issues. What is the difference, I think that the Agile method and the communication is much more building by the method itself but I think in general to succeed in any project, communication is needed in my opinion of course. I don't know what you think is the best method?
Andrei Pavel: Just to add on what Tom said, I think larger more complex projects also have a - not necessarily waterfall approach - but definitely a planning approach over the entire project. I think the difference is that you don't go on every function or technical detail from the start, but it's in the discovery process, it's an adaptation process, it's a process that enables you to change your mind and that's good, we think, but in the end I think it's also about communication and I know this is a very common word these days but it's so very true. In the end the way you communicate, the way you interact, the transparency, the transparency on the reporting either to the team or to the customer is it's very important. So doing Agile doesn't mean that we don't do preparation or we do we don't do planning or we don't build a high level architecture or a high level backlog, so the definition of what the project will do. In any case, I think Tom put it very nicely that it's more built in the framework, because the Scrum framework at least, well indicates, recommends that you have those daily stand-ups, that you have the demos, that you have the planning's, that you have a lot of discussions. So of course in the end it' a framework - you can change it based on the challenge at hand, but in the end it comes with these incorporated and embedded tools to enhance a little bit the communication. Where maybe in waterfall you don't have these, at least embedded in the framework, of course that doesn't mean you cannot do it.
Mihai Popa: How are your clients doing working remotely? They are probably less experienced than you, working remotely. Are they a barrier to good productivity? What say you?
Emina Dzuzdanovic: I think this was a very interesting situation that we had so in our previous experience of course I was working nearshore and on occasion of course I would travel to Belgium and then we would kickstart some things and I would return back and then we would all continue, while I was not in Belgium it was a challenge and you were always thinking okay you set up a meeting but then you don't know what happens after that meeting because you're not there and you think maybe something's getting resolved on the hallways and how usually business happens. But now it was an interesting situation because the clients are also working remotely and they could see the challenge that we usually have, and usually when we had a meeting before the COVID situation, they were 10 people in one meeting using a remote tool, the tube with the cameras and so on and the sound was not very good, they were talking between themselves we could not hear it of course. Of course it was challenging, but now they have seen how it goes and now even when the COVID situation started and they were still in the office it was not yet isolation time, they did not meet in open meetings they joined the meetings remote via their own computer with their headset and it was quite more productive it was more clear and so on. The key about remote meetings I would say is always that you really need to come prepared you need to be focused and know the value of that meeting, you want to know what do you want to get from that and to have a clear set of questions, a scenario. Of course, if you're having some functional talk if you have an analysis if you can visualize something, a flow or something, do that because that also gives more interaction between them. It was an interesting thing to see, of course at the beginning it was hard on them but I think now they're very used to it, because we are all in the same situation right now and even between them they had to figure out a way how to keep their own business going not only the interaction with Cegeka.
Mihai Popa: Another question which I had in mind was… now we've all heard the good part and what we've tried and worked, but what I would be very curious to know because it's not all roses, it's what did you try to do and didn't work in this new set up?
Elke de Mits: I think, the things that we tried on the doing for team-building at the beginning, if I look at my team there were a lot of ideas and “oh let's do a happy hour” and “let's do an extra stand-up” and there were a lot of ideas, we also tried them and it was fun, and now we are in the system that new ideas are not there anymore. We need to do more efforts to keep those new ideas and to keep maintaining them especially now we know that we won’t go back to the office next week. So I don't think there are a lot of things that didn't work out but now the issue is to maintain the new ideas and the new ways of working and even may improve them.
Tom Hendrickx: If I look at it from my side I think we already were distributed before; I think what it's the most difficult that it's this moment is to get to the bottom of discussions to the customer on what strategy we have for the next quarters and 2021. As I said as long as it's purely operational that is easily solved, but sometimes you have to do in-depth discussions and it’s a little bit more hard with the customer at the moment and because those things are firmly still best to be done face to face.
Mihai Popa: Did you try to fix the knowledge management barrier when you weren't bumping into other teams in the office with teams using Confluence more or some other method?
Tom Hendrickx: Very good question but I think again is the same principle as always and so when it doesn't happen automatically anymore, you need to make that explicit so what we have done it's also something that we already did before, we organized internal team demo’s, we're all the teams demonstrate at the end of two weeks to each other what they have made, why they have made, focus specifically on the frontend, meaning the screen and what the customers get to see because we want to be transparent because we are 8 different teams, so that is something that you need explicit, also we need to plan two times a week over the teams to make sure who is doing what if there is one team that needs something from another team, also to make explicit time for those kind of discussions. So it’s the same principle but doesn't happen automatically you need to make sure that it happens in another way by organizing platforms to do those kind of discussions. From my position, I cannot say if the teams use Confluence more or maybe, documentation….
Elke de Mits: I think most teams use like us Jira and Slack and other tools.
Andrei Pavel: Maybe just to touch a little bit on the previous question and then jump to the next one, we use Confluence in quite some teams as a knowledge base, as a Wiki, it's mostly related to the work of that team so maybe document further the specific requirement or a specific decision or maybe document the architectural choices. Of course these are shared between teams, but then indeed you need an explicit effort to just browse to that.
Looking at the previous question what didn't work well and maybe going into the details of what another team is doing, you don't maybe find that very often in a remote environment versus if you are in the same physical location that you just hear from the team that is sitting next to you or maybe at the coffee machine where you meet with not only your team but with other teams and of course things pop up from process-related challenges too technical related challenges, and that is a little bit missing and of course there are some virtual coffee breaks or even an afternoon break or after hours something like a beer break but it's still on the same team level so I think that's still a challenge, and what if the lockdown goes all year? I think it depends a little bit on how hard the COVID will hit us again in the fall it looks like everyone is discussing now that is going to be a second wave the general opinion is that it may be not as hard as the first one, in any case everybody will have already some experience so to be really honest of course we are not focusing on what will happen if this is reinstated for the rest of the year but of course we'll take it step by step also looking at what happens and why not looking at others how they do it and what are some of the ideas, what can you do even better.
Probably there are a lot of things you know it's always a challenge to communicate and of course there are a lot of initiatives also with the help of our colleagues from HR and other business partners to go even further on the communication level but I'm convinced that we can do even better there, and it's also about transparency, I think it's also about giving a meaning to the work of our colleagues - and you can also do that by communicating, maybe communicating more on even the business strategy or I don't know to enforce more the successes that we have or underline more the successes that we have because even in this harsh period we do still have successes and that's really good it makes us really happy and one recent example and I think it's good to maybe mention it very shortly, we had a situation where we participated in a bid at the beginning then it was on hold because of the COVID situation as the customer decided but a couple of weeks ago, two weeks ago they decided to resume.
So to us I think that's a good signal, a strong signal that the digitization and also the digital transformation will continue on some businesses and probably will be mandatory in order to survive or to remain competitive or to remain relevant in this COVID situation and I think it's a big plus that things are going even further even in this situation and it's also important that this also sets a career and growth path for our colleagues if we get new deals if we get new logos and what can we do better is to focus a little bit and to adapt to the current situation which is a bit different from what was there before. What are the areas that we can maybe look more careful into, what are the businesses that need more digital transformation how can we at Cegeka support, guide those businesses and I think it's also a thing to adapt to and I don't expect personally that it will end in the summer but it will probably also continue next year as well and then maybe a focus in this direction even more and more.
Mihai Popa: I think that what might change if we get this state prolonged until the end of the year is that we will manage to put some pace into it, if so far we were running the business just you know making efforts to adjust to the situation and you know hit the ground running then we'll be able to set some pace to what we do and also probably before the end of the year we'll have some projects being completed as well and then we'll be able to analyse them and find out even more clearly what went well and what didn't and I'm sure we'll have quite some findings there.
Andrei Pavel: Totally agree Cliff regarding the responsibility and ownership and encouraging creativity. I think it's important that as leaders as managers we don't hover over what our people are doing but just give them the trust that they are doing well encourage them support them of course but having this rule to be creative can definitely contribute to the motivation ideally.
Tom Hendrickx: So we are for a longer series now in what we call a new normal situation providing growth and opportunities to learn because you have to also give the right message to the team members. Ok it’s different than what you are used to but the world keeps on turning so also for them it's important that they can have the feeling that they grow they don't turn into robots because everybody works in a corner. For a longer period we want to make sure that people can continue to take up responsibilities to grow to learn new things and so on and also for that we need to find other ways to keep on having. But I think it's important that if we help the team to work as close as possible as they were used to before so it's not because that position stays that we change our way of working.
Mihai Popa: We have about five more minutes; if anyone else, or Cliff for that matter, have any further questions please ask ahead. Is it harder to create further business with the client when both sides are locked down? It depends on the client I would say. It depends on the business they’re in. Some customers really need to increase their digitalization efforts and allocate more budgets towards increasing their sales channels, but others have their budgets cut. It depends on the industry, I think.
Andrei Pavel: I think it's different looking at the example that I gave a couple of minutes back the kickstart of the project we won the bid I was telling you about with a big insurance company and the the initial plan was that we do a kickoff face-to-face with the customer and the team of the customer which was quite large I think there were around 10 people also 10 people on our side but of course with the COVID and the lockdown that was not possible and we as a company but them also they were used to a kickoff at least, and then of course recurrent meetings to see face to face the level and the detail of communication can be on a different level but then we had to adapt so I think that's one of the important things here that maybe if it's different maybe if it's harder it's the way that it is and if you adapt then you'll survive and why not thrive and if not then it’s going to be a bit of a challenge and I think the sooner the businesses realize that and they are open to remote collaboration the better for everyone. And in the end just to conclude that the kickoff was done by by teams and we switched the videos because you want to put a face to the name and it went quite well maybe not really on the same level as face to face but to be really honest unexpected, we all got to know each other also some relaxing moments with the customer and we did that initial discussion and the professional bonding on a good level, and now things are progressing that way and we have live discussions often maybe more often that when we we did before and for this moment at least the project is progressing really well and things can be a little bit challenging at the beginning but it's quite allright. Hopefully in a couple of months if we do another webinar I can confirm that things are still on the right path but I'm very confident and positive that will be the case.
Mihai Popa: All right so I think we've gone past the initial 30 minutes that we've allotted, but I feel this was a very useful conversation very interesting questions. So thank you everybody for participating thank you for your questions I hope we'll meet again at another webinar quite soon so thanks a lot and have a good day.