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This is standard, right? Once we are over the winter holidays, we start thinking about the plans for the new year. Professional and private goals are important as well, even if you do more promises than you can keep…after all this is the engine which motivates you to keep going further.

On company level this looks a bit different, but the basic idea is the same, getting better this year and improving as many stuffs we can till the end of 2020.

If we ask our assistant manager, most probably she will say that we should all pay more attention to her notification emails without getting back to her with stupid questions. She sends clear, super great emails, still we never manage to pay attention to details and understand 100% what that notification was about.

If we ask our HR manager, she will say that Lynx would invest more time in its resources’ motivation and learning to help developers grow. Motivation is a key aspect to keep our employees and make them come to work with a happy face.

Our middle management team would desire better attitude from the teams, better productivity and more open minded for new technologies.

Our cleaning lady would die for more attention on cleanness from our part. We are a relatively big team meaning that we do quite a lot of mess. Guess we could not resist 3 days without her services. What an incredible value to our company’s life.

Wonder what our CEO would want for this year? Tell you what: more motivation, more interest in learning the unknown, more fairness on multi-directional relationship, regardless if this is a customer, partner, employee, service provider, etc. collaboration.

But let’s see what Lynx’s goals are for 2020.

Make quality a habit

This is no surprise that every software development company is struggling with bugs and quality issues around their products. Developers are human, they can’t write bug free code, it’s almost impossible. Our company is improving the internal QA department introducing new quality assurance standards during the software development life cycle.

This year’s goal is to start applying the new QA and QC methodologies and by this making our customers more satisfied than in previous years.

Do, measure, improve, repeat

Start using KPI’s in a different manner than before. This year Lynx is rethinking the KPI’s. Measurable key performance indicators are indispensables on every project. Monitoring a project’s or a resource’s productivity is a must. We plan to approach this from 3 angles: billable, non-billable and productive hours’ reflection on the budget. Overhead and workload will influence the end result but once getting through the numbers, we can set the optimal KPIs.

Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash

Get to a pro level

We have lead architects supervising our projects. The standard team structure is always containing a manager, a lead architect, the developers and the tester, as a real cross functional team set. Still there is a natural need for centralizing the work of architects so starting with this year we have the individual entity of the Architecture team. The main focus will be on applying the best practices, providing the best solutions possible and not running away from cutting edge technologies.

Photo by Max Chen on Unsplash

Step out of the box

Not keeping up with the innovation is like digging your own grave. The IT market is not waiting for anybody, it’s running on the highway with the speed of light without looking around who wants to jump up on his side. We are more than eager to stop being afraid of new technologies. We want to step out of our comfort zone and start diving into the unknown. This was a great benefit for our evolution in the past too, so we plan to continue doing this also in 2020. Welcome React and Microsoft Blob, we are not afraid of any of you.

A healthy mind in a healthy body

Staying fit is important, sports are playing a significant role in our company’s policy. We have spa and gym monthly membership offered to our employees and we continue to keep offering this benefit. Every year we are present at the Critical Mass from Târgu Mureș, and we have our yearly ski weekend up at the Harghita mountains. Doing exercises is healthy, it helps you to clear your mind from the everyday problems.

This is not a new promise for 2020 but we’ll like to continue doing it, in the idea of “mens sana in corpore sano” 🙂

Photo by Gemilang Sinuyudhan on Unsplash