Seamless Collaboration: Building a Team-oriented App in the Netherlands

The Challenge: Structuring Collaboration

Based in the Netherlands, BizzyOwl creates team-oriented digital products that make organizing work more efficient and streamlined all in one place. The CEO realized there was a market for organizing work better between multi-person teams and keeping track of progress all in one place—rather than distributed across many different technologies and apps. The current BizzyOwl platform is specifically developed to fill the gaps that arise on the dividing line between projects and processes.

But the product did not begin this way. The client had many early ideas, suggesting that the software could have various features, which posed a risk regarding the time and cost of the project. To avoid these kinds of risks Polcode conducted regular sprint planning and review meetings to align on the most important bits of software product design: how to move forward with collaboration, and ensure a successful product launch at the end of the process.

The Solution: Getting Back Control of Work

Developing a comprehensive solution for BizzyOwl was conducted using an Agile methodology. By breaking apart the large project into smaller sprints, Polcode was able to begin architecting a solution that could easily adapt to changes. Each sprint helped our cross-functional teams to brainstorm, define, and model new approaches to business issues. This is critical when designing a new product for a business owner who may not know exactly what technical solution they need, but have a strong business view of what the product should achieve.

By challenging the business issues and objectives with each weekly sprint, the development process could ebb and flow with changing conditions and viewpoints.

Creating BizzyOwl was a sort of “meta” experience. The product itself is focused on teamwork and collaboration. By getting in control of our own teamwork processes with the client, we were actually experiencing the pain points and challenges of our end-users. This ultimately resulted in a better understanding of the product’s needs--structure in teamwork is about making everyone feel in control of every part of a project.

How BizzyOwl Works

BizzyOwl is a central online platform that gives project leaders and managers full insights and overviews of daily activities.

The insights make it possible to structure and streamline these activities, increasing productivity and employee satisfaction. The selling point that gets customers to choose BizzyOwl is a permanent reduction in operational cost, so that projects can be completed on budget and on time.

BizzyOwl was built around three concepts and designed for business-as-usual processes. For example, it can integrate with workflows like Scrum, Lean, Six Sigma, Prince2, and Agile models with a few clicks.

Always up-to-date Scrum board
The Scrum board allows teams to identify the tasks that need to be completed, ensure that everyone is working on a project task, and keeps track of current sprint progress. BizzyOwl's digital Scrum Board is the central board used for Daily Scrums. Project managers always have an up-to-date overview of the activities for that day.
Precise task management
BizzyOwl task management project managers always have full control, not only over their own tasks, but also across team members. For example, you can easily adjust the status of each other's tasks and add comments. Each form of collaboration has its own task list with a personal and overall dashboard. You can also visualize the progress per KPI via a graph in the dashboard. It is immediately clear whether your team is on schedule or needs to revisit the assignments.
Reliable workload and hour tracking
BizzyOwl details how many hours a task has taken. During the next planning phase, these insights drive more realistic estimations. This feature is designed to enable the optimal usage of available resources within an organization. It also prevents cases where hours are over-assigned, leading to unrealistic expectations in deadlines, or worse, developer burnout.
Tightly organized sprint planning
BizzyOwl also features backlog prioritization, showing the most important tasks, how the team aims to complete them, and how they all fit within the digital Scrum sprint plan.

Hear from our client:

After a long search for a good development party, Polcode emerged as proactive, helpful and efficient. After a visit to Warsaw and a small test project, I consciously chose Polcode. Quality, proactive attitude and a broad source of developers with different specializations were important to me.

Berny Boer

CEO at BizzyOwl

The Outcomes: Seamless Teamwork

The result of the project was a production release of a modern application and solution for team collaboration online. BizzyOwl has acquired early bird users who have given feedback about the current benefits they gain, including:

More satisfaction and less frustration with managing SCRUM sessions
Faster overall efficiency in project completion timelines via clear task outcomes and visible representations of responsibility
Easier workflows with managing tasks, sprint planning, future improvements and SCRUM boards all integrated into one system
More convenient collaboration modes with meeting modules, team ‘barometers’, visual OGSM (objective, goals, strategies, and measures) boards, and SCRUM boards.
Clearer insights into overall team productivity

While the BizzyOwl application is still considered within the early stages of product development, Polcode has planned a breadth of features to introduce into the platform, which includes user-centric UI/UX updates to make the system even friendlier.