How to successfully carry out a project with 4 partners in just 6 months?

At the beginning of October, the Estonian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Estonian Information Technology and Telecommunications Association (ITL) and four Estonian IT companies - Gofore, Trinidad Wiseman, Aktors and Kodality - embarked on a special mission to develop the Team Europe Partnerships Portal (TEPP) in six months.

The TEPP is a platform ordered by the European Commission that helps to join the needs of partnership countries and the innovative solutions of European Union member states.

TWN provided an analyst, designers/user experience (UX) experts, testers and a developer for the project. Our work on the project began with the analyst and designers unravelling the initial brief and determining what additional input was needed from the client.

We had to determine which of the initially planned functionalities were the most critical, bearing in mind the timeframe and financial constraints of the project. We planned the meetings and follow-up activities to get everything done on time.

The next step was to map out the requirements and simplify the portal functionalities for the TEPP to be as user-friendly as possible. For example, we created a filtering option for users to search the portal for suitable partners for cooperation based on a specific role and project type.

We also made the vocabulary of the portal a little more understandable for the average user. Complicated and sometimes slightly bureaucratic word usage can confuse the average user who is not used to such vocabulary.

As part of mapping the requirements, we designed prototype views in Figma. These helped with development as well as with getting the development team and the customer "on the same page". We were also able to use the views at a later stage to introduce the portal to various interested parties.

In parallel with the creation of Figma designs, we also started describing development tickets and creating documentation so that we would not lose valuable time and could start developing as soon as possible.

The work process in the project was very agile - every week, the designers finished various designs, and after the client’s approval, we could start creating the documentation, describing the development tickets and developing these.

From the beginning of the project, we emphasized the importance of quality assurance (QA). In addition to classic software testing, we were able to provide expertise to help make the portal accessible to people with different needs. It was essential for us that the TEPP complied with WCAG requirements to ensure access for as many people as possible.

The TEPP can be considered a complex project for many reasons. One of the reasons was the tight timeframe, which meant that people, most of whom had not worked together before, had to become a united team very quickly.

For example, the development team members came from four different companies, but we needed to get the work process in place very quickly so we could start developing the portal in one-week sprints.

The team members also had different international backgrounds and worked in three different time zones. And it so happened that when we had morning meetings, the developer who was working in Armenia had already been working for several hours. To save time, we had to make sure we had informed him the previous evening about what he would develop the next day.

Although the work was usually done remotely, we managed to get our development process running relatively seamlessly in the first few weeks. At the beginning of each week, there was a meeting to plan the sprint. In addition, there was a short meeting every morning to plan the team members’ work and goals, and on Friday afternoons we reviewed what had been done during the week.

Thanks to electronic tools - such as MS Teams, Slack and Atlassian tools - we were able to communicate smoothly and no questions were left unanswered. The remote work experience during the Covid-19 pandemic certainly contributed to the smooth cooperation within the team.

We also organized a couple of team events to get to know each other better and have a good time - one took place virtually with the client’s representatives, and the other was a live event with the team where many people met for the first time in real life.

During the six-month project, a lot was developed - almost everything that was written in the initial project plan. In addition to the home page and the introductory page of the portal, it is now possible to publish and read the portal’s success stories.

It is also possible to search for companies and organizations as well as relevant projects. Once the necessary organizations and projects are found, the organizations can contact each other and build successful relationships.

Members of organizations can also join their organization on the portal and create projects. In addition, we developed new pages to perform administrative tasks, including a page reflecting the portal's statistics as well as an interactive map.

According to the TEPP Project Manager Katrin Rohtla, the team did an excellent job and achieved a lot.