About proALPHA

Our collaboration started in 2016 with the request from proALPHA to control their growing product backlog. During our talk we noticed that the product backlog wasn’t only growing, but proALPHA also has big plans with their product roadmap, has a challenge with creating the right focus for their developers and needed to assess the development processes with tooling. This all means that a collaboration should not only be a development based on a backlog, but also a tight collaboration between two companies who likes to reach the same goal which is ‘Optimally fulfill the requirements as a team where the focus is to empower hidden champions’.

The slogan of proALPHA is ‘We have empowered Hidden Champions for 25 years’. With this proALPHA not only means their customers, but also their employees.

Present Connection showed how we work with our customers, discussed the plan of approach. and this gave proALPHA enough trust to start with the first steps.

The first steps were:
- Define the developer profiles with the expected expertise and skills together with the Present Connection HR and Development;
- Together select a team (in this case) of 4 persons with 1 team lead based on these profiles suggested by Present Connection;
- Together define the current development process and adapt the new Lithuanian colleagues in this process;
- Together define the right remote tools and security protocols;
- Together select the right development stories. In first instance we engaged the Lithuanian colleages with stories which repeat themselves and touches all main functionality of the proALPHA ERP environment. In this way the new core team of Present Connection learned about the ERP system and various new proALPHA colleagues and of course proALPHA got connected with their new Present Connection colleagues;
- Training trips to Germany and Poland;
- Meeting trips to Germany by the teamlead and Engagement manager where we discussed about refinement of the process, quality, productivity, testing, support, knowledge, tooling, protocols, security and all other important topics to improve our collaboration.

During this first period the trust in each other grew. We showed that we are a reliable partner and took over work like List & Labels, Country Components and was even developing new functionality. More and more the proALPHA development departments relate to their new Lithuanian colleagues willing to give work. This meant that the proALPHA developers are more focused on delivering quality to their customers instead of quantity, the product backlog is stable, development processes and tools are improved and road is paved for the new ambitious roadmap.

About 2 years ago proALPHA and Present Connection decided that it was about time to take a new step in our collaboration. Present Connection is not only part of the product backlog, but is now even planned as a part in the long-term roadmap.

This step enabled Present Connection to work on even more complex developments and cool new functionality, which is much more challenging, but it also gives proALPHA more confident that they can reach their long-term development plans.

We are proud to announce that due to our collaboration we have welcomed our 22nd Lithuanian colleague at proALPHA in April 2020.

Further we are proud that during our 4 year collaboration we reached the ability to roll-out the ambitious plan, the development process with tooling improved a lot, we met nice colleagues, learned a lot from each other, the development capacity in Germany even grew as well and we are able to Empower Hidden Champions on colleague and customer side with encouraging innovations.