Digital workplace solution for a leader in employee engagement and productivity

Story

The client is a PE-backed provider of digital workplace solutions, empowering over 7K organizations across diverse industries, including healthcare, manufacturing, retail, finance, and education, to enhance communication, collaboration, and culture. Facing an intranet industry crowded with over 50 alternatives, and a 15-year-old legacy product of their own, the client recognized the imperative to adopt a unique strategy to preserve their competitive edge. Approaching the end of the investment lifecycle, the client needed to demonstrate their capability in efficiently onboarding customers onto their new platform. Despite heavily leveraging tech vendors, there was a lack of technical leadership resulting in the possibility of missing a launch deadline which was prioritized by the board. Understanding the necessity to face this challenge, the client reached out to Symphony to modernize their digital workplace. 

Challenge

The board's deadlines, slow delivery, unplanned story inclusions, and task overload delayed progress and development velocity. At the same time, the transition to microservices architecture required adjustments, and the client lacked QA processes, resulting in frequent feature redoing and compromised product quality, prompting the client to seek a partner to align with timelines and deliverables.

What we did

During a 2-week Assessment phase, the Symphony team identified the key tech drivers for modernization and tech modernization strategies. Collaborating with the client's in-house team, we were tasked to act as an accelerator in the journey, generating value and expediting the roadmap while minimizing disruption to the existing team's delivery pace.

Notifications was the first identified feature our team developed, followed by taking ownership of a larger portion of the roadmap. We built custom solutions for Bulk User Import and Recommendation Engine, which was developed through a matrix factorization method and preceded by a build vs. buy analysis to ensure the most effective approach. Symphony embraced a microservices architecture and improved the client’s market positioning by introducing an ML-powered intranet solution. By centralizing communication and refining content navigation, we improved user engagement and used real-time updates to improve collaboration. The ML-powered personalized content discovery facilitated knowledge-sharing and scalable user management features were implemented, optimizing operational efficiency and supporting organizational growth.  Our team ensured seamless integration of these enhancements without compromising delivery timelines, developed comprehensive documentation, and organized multiple recorded sessions, guiding the in-house team through the handover process. Following this, we consistently updated the handover documentation and chose the best development path based on the in-house team's skill set. In the end, Symphony transitioned from the initial accelerator role to a transformational partner one, scaling up to 14 team members.