Transforming a business through custom software has its challenges, according to Ying Loong:
- “How do we control and manage expectations?
- How do we build software fast that is extremely high quality? Very rigorous testing.
- How do you manage tech debt? Because the faster you go, you accumulate tech debt, and that’s not good. We needed to strike a good balance. No customer wants to hear about this. They want to hear what is good and what’s working for them.”
Another key factor for his success in this journey was engagement with managers, customers and users on the ground. The team included their own developers, Ops Tech managers, and the PhoenixDX team, creating a culture of change and constant user experience improvement.
“We spent a lot of effort ensuring the security officers could express their fears, express their discomfort in the new way of doing things.
Most of them were from operational management, they came from the security industry. They knew how to do rosters. They knew how to lead people as managers. They had developed a passion for technology over the years and for communicating with people about technology.
What they do is take the technology to the ground, talk to the officers and say: ‘Okay, why are you not doing this? Why are you struggling with that?’ From those discussions, they brought these experiences back to the development table and shared what they had learned from the officers and that there was a better way to do something. Then we made significant improvements to our user interfaces, to the way we collected the data, and deployed the solutions.
These offset discussions and conversations that we had with our customers and our staff have been a key component in our journey. It actually helped us grow very quickly.
Riding on the success we’ve seen in Sydney trains, we have many other successes. I’m happy to share a story about when we took over a major international airport.
We ran Sydney airport, so we were very good at running security in an airport. When we went to this airport, we thought, okay, we knew how to run it. We have all these ideas, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) that we can translate, and all these digital solutions that we can implement… but when we went there, again, not surprisingly, the customer had their own unique take on how to get things done.
The software that we wanted to deploy was not 100% compatible with their system, there were too many things to do and only three weeks to deploy. We could either rewrite the entire software or make a painful effort to adjust to the software that we had. I have to congratulate the spirit of the team; they said rewriting it was faster. So we did sprints of five to six days taking on the entire wishlist. We deployed a beta version in 3.5 weeks, and we met the tight timeline that was impossible, right? “
This hybrid model of the Certis team working in partnership with PhoenixDX allowed them to deploy high-quality software quickly.
We have the customers totally impressed with how we can deliver things in a very short period of time. They were very, very impressed with their jaws on the floor. Not just about the speed, the way the software was developed so quickly, but the total understanding of what the customer wanted from us overlaid with our many, many years of security experience.
Operational DNA and our knowledge of how security should work are quite clear in the way we design applications. When we deployed, the customer could see that the change managers worked very well because we control the training of the staff, we control the development, we control changes after deployment. All this expertise and in-house capability allowed us to support the customer better.
I hope you get encouraged by our journey. If you have a software journey that you want to take yourself, please go in knowing that you will have a lot of obstacles to clear, but with passion, with energy, with the ability to connect, listening to your staff, to your development teams, the operation teams and most importantly, your customers, you will have a lot of success. When you look back, you will never regret it.
I hope you have enjoyed our journey so far.
For more information about Certis BOSS Digital Product Suite, please read this case study.
