The Romanian entrepreneurial landscape has witnessed quite a few success stories during these recent years. Our workforce is well-known for its technical skills, and therefore technology businesses have gained their place into the spotlight.
One of the most representative examples is Fortech, one of the fastest-growing technology companies in Central and Eastern Europe. They have vast expertise in software development and a strong company culture that has been the backbone of their progress. Curious about how they managed to scale so fast and what are some of the recent changes they’ve experienced due to his year, we had a chat with their CEO — Calin Vaduva.
Fortech is one of our fellow Transylvanian companies, which really managed to spread the tech movement. Can you take us briefly through the company history and how it scaled from a 5-member company to an 800 one?
Thank you for your friendship. To answer your question, Fortech’s journey can be summarized as a constant quest for excellence in software engineering. During our 16+ years of existence, we have maintained a business model that revolves around evolution, innovation, and continuous growth. This approach is what has gradually propelled us from 5 to 800 members.
Three strategic programs have been constant candidates on our business agenda and helped build the business the way it is today: the evolution of our outsourcing business model; the formation of strategic partnerships, JV and alliances; the exploration of niched solution areas.
From a tactical standpoint, there’s much that has been done to help us scale, but few ideas come immediately to mind:
- Nurturing a culture of learning from our clients. This has helped us to anchor our business objectives into real market needs.
- Incorporating diversity in our core. These are being reflected in the richness of our tech stack, of our geographical focus, in our national hub of talents, in our industry focuses but also on the way we organized the activity in more business units.
- Adopting and adapting next-gen technologies and delivery models that transcend the areal of team extension. These have helped us to gradually evolve away from traditional software outsourcing and embrace the realm of disruptive software development.
- Reorienting our business strategy to better sustain the development of a vertical-centric model.
- Building alliances and joint ventures. This opened us new windows into the realm of niched software solution areas.
- Growing a team of mature tech leaders, able to manage end-to-end software projects, manage distributed and diverse development team configurations while harmonizing our own cultures with our client’s culture.
- Fine-tuning of our operations and delivery processes. We have obtained internationally recognized standards of software quality and security.
- Developing internal programs of innovation focused on conducting dedicated MVP projects and hackathons for our active clients, or for prospects to help them explore and test new technology approached for their products before engaging in big investments.
Can you tell us more about your partnering with Holland Fintech and future plans regarding this collaboration?
Holland Fintech is a large European financial network. Since our experience and interest in the financial sector is growing, we have decided to become part of the ecosystem. This offers us the chance to interact, exchange knowledge with a vertical-centred community, and stay connected with the financial sector trends. As a result, we are better equipped to understand the evolving digitization needs of the business operating in the financial industry and the role of technology as an innovator enabler for the next generation of financial services. Regarding the future plan, we intend to acquire and infuse specific industry knowhow to elevate our software offering for financial clients. Secondly, we are looking to connect with other players who share our interest in exploring niche software solution areas.
How has the company adapted to this year’s changes and what are the best methods for managing such big teams, when remote?
First of all, we have had previous experience in working in distributed teams, given our organization in multiple locations, and that helped us to run a smooth transition to remote at scale. We needed to upgrade some of the systems, yet we managed to migrate the entire team in working-from-mode in about a week. Our IT team organized special security awareness training sessions for the whole team to ensure an extra level of protection against any potential risks associated with such a complex orchestration of efforts and resources. Also, we already have established quality and delivery processes that helped us continue our projects without any significant disruptions.
Secondly, we put together an internal Health Awareness Team, dedicated to taking care of all health-related practices and internal COVID-19 information. Additionally, we organized a few dedicated COVID-19 Informative sessions with SMURD paramedics for our team members.
Finally, in the wake of the pandemic, we have strengthened a multidisciplinary team formed of account managers, marketing, and development engineers who employ a consultative approach all along the buying journey, trying to understand and respond to their changing needs, especially on their mission-critical projects.
When it comes to the methods, for managing big teams remotely, we have applied a few practices at company level. These include using the agile ceremonies and sprints; having the right collaboration tools in place; creating spaces of connection — for instance, these days, we are organizing internal webinars with the leadership for the entire team, to openly discuss our business scenarios in the context of the pandemic; an internal coaching model; team engagement activities.
Fortech is an official partner of Techsylvania: Beyond Borders. Discover more about them at https://www.fortech.ro/
