What companies should focus on during challenging times

The business impact of Covid-19

This year was a defining year for everybody, due to coronavirus outbreak.
COVID-19 has put unprecedented strain on personal and economic activity, causing world-changing and paradigm-shifting for everybody involved.
This period is a significant turning point as people, organizations and communities around the world are adapting to the new reality, sorting out new ways to cope with industries’ dynamics.

Matei Gogea, our CEO, shared his thoughts about this challenging year and the core mindset we had:

As a business owner and a leader, you have an important role to play in ensuring the wellbeing of your team and the business continuity. 
At Avangarde Software, the health and safety of our colleagues, customers, partners and the communities in which we operate is our number one priority.
Over the past year, I felt it was more important than ever to have open communication, show empathy and explore new plans and ideas.
The outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic in various parts of the world gave a major impact on health and economy in terms of trade, investment and tourism.
The new challenges we faced globally were felt by small and medium-sized companies especially, which had to show a greater capacity for adaptation and flexibility. SMEs needed to change the mindset in running the business by using technology transformation.
It’s the time to be creative, adapt, stay strong and healthy, and stand together.
We paid more attention to the possibilities that technology and digital transformation can bring across the private sector. They became a critical enabler of connectivity, facilitating the continuity of our regular lives and connecting people more than ever before and will likely continue to do so into 2021.
As a software company deploying its products internationally, Avangarde Software has developed and improved its services over time to allow us to serve our clients 100% remotely if necessary.
Our mindset from the beginning of this pandemic was that social distancing doesn’t have to be a social disconnection. Keeping our team’s spirits high was equally important and essential to maintaining productivity. We find more meaning than ever in supporting each other, in strengthening and growing our team, while focusing on delivering excellent customer services and robust software applications.

We have provided several key points for you to consider about our business strategies, working methods and company culture.

Ensuring business continuity and continuous delivery

Digital transformation became the prime focus of attention for businesses, governments, citizens when the world collided with the COVID pandemic, early in 2020.
We felt we were well equipped to cope with the shifting in the international environment and to support all our clients at the highest standard of agility and productivity.
Our development procedure and infrastructure have been prepared for online work and remote access. Our projects often required teams of different cultures to work together, that is why throughout the years we have developed a high cross-cultural understanding, intercultural communication skills and management competencies.
At Avangarde Software we put considerable effort in continuous delivery, attention to quality, offering the same services, roles, and responsibilities as we did before.
As we aligned with all measures applied by local governments, we focused on providing high-end services to all our partners, supporting virtual teams, and ensuring operations continuity.
Our business strategy for 2021 includes technology investments to improve company performance, making widespread use of cloud apps and services, with a flexible and mobile workforce, excellent online customer experiences and mastery of data and analytics.

The key to our success during challenging times

Avangarde Software continues to develop long-term strategic partnerships for software development, with flexible methodologies that allow multiple teams to respond to development stages and changes in a fast and productive manner. Our teams are working at full capacity and our fast ramp-up has not been affected.
We’ve successfully adapted the standard techniques of agile methodology to remote working after most of our staff shifted to work from home, according to the health and safety regulations.
Our Agile teams working remotely have an efficient flow of meeting hours, tools used, communication processes, sprint goals, etc. Together we focus more on empathy, positive-thinking and technical support, to mitigate all risks associated with this working environment.
We are proud to announce that we are ISO 27001:2013 certified. This certification confirms once again the company’s engagement in helping businesses embrace the digital age by creating reliable software and delivering exceptional services.
A people-centric culture that nurtures our employees and our customers is the key to our success and what recommends us.
We seek to build the concept of quality into every aspect of our business, continuous improvement is designed to solve problems and gradually improve the efficiency of our work processes.

Shifting to an online culture

Following the advice of government and public health authorities, we have implemented a range of precautionary measures, from sanitation and cleaning protocols to workplace distancing and healthy recommendations.
Most of our team transitioned to work from home in mid-March and we have taken significant steps to safeguard and support their well-being.
We are extremely proud of and grateful to our colleagues who come on-site to ensure business continuity.
We focus on providing high-quality communication, team bonding, agile planning, addressing any cultural gaps and keeping our traditions alive online.

Here are some of our support and crisis management measures:

• our remote teams engage in regular team socializing, so everyone can stay connected;
• we use video conferencing, to provide the face time that you would otherwise lose;
• ease of accessing the company’s networks & systems and collaborations tools;
• team leads are vigilant about the emotional needs of their colleagues;
• we keep our traditions alive (online teambuilding, increased frequency of one-on-ones, virtual coffee time, etc.);
• use humour to look at a situation in a positive way, to inspire hope and keep us grounded.

In 2020, we develop a genuine human connection while working remote, we built trust and inclusion.
Our team managed to stay strong, connected, to maintain high motivation levels through constant communication, responsiveness, health & safety measures, accessibility and sense of humour.

We believe that there is enormous potential to harness digitalisation and new technologies to make industries more efficient and increase productivity.
While the company has grown and evolved tremendously, we’ve enjoyed working with people from various industries. We bring innovation and excellence to our customers by continuously evolving and improving in everything we do and by focusing on being in a constant state of growth.
At Avangarde Software we work hard to make sure that our skills and expertise may be exactly the thing you need to get through these challenging times and to enable you to innovate and achieve scalability.