Background
Nelly.com is one of Scandinavia’s largest online fashion houses. Nelly’s offering for its largely young, trendy, outgoing clientele ranges from clothing to shoes to beauty products and accessories, with a wide selection of over 700 brands. The company offers close to 300 new products from internationally well-known fashion houses and the company’s own brands; NLY Trend, NLY Shoes, NLY Lingerie, and NLY Design and serves customers across Europe and beyond.
Challenge
Responding to ever changing consumer demands in the fast paced fashion industry, meant that Nelly’s in-house software development team was too tied up with day to day activities that required immediate attention, to focus on the long term technological roadmap of the company. Hence, critical improvements to backend systems that could increase the company’s responsiveness and operational efficiency – the lifeblood of any e-commerce operation – were being postponed continuously.
Following a global search for a reliable and innovative partner and having scouted a number of companies in various countries, Nelly chose to establish a remote extended team with Calcey in Sri Lanka. The extended team would focus on Nelly’s long-term technological roadmap – streamlining backend processes and enhancing the front-end user experience. Developing an e-commerce focused Android mobile app from scratch, was a key project amongst the early challenges tackled by this team.
Solution
Entering into a long-term retainer agreement, Nelly, reaped the benefits of a dedicated pool of developers working exclusively on their projects. In order to help the team work seamlessly, without the need for extensive documentation and formalities, a client scrum master was stationed on-site at Calcey’s development center in Colombo. This investment to set up the project for success, complimenting Calcey’s collaborative and fully transparent approach to setting up extended teams.
Calcey’s extended team for Nelly was able come up to speed quickly and tackle a number of projects to improve Nelly’s backend, that were previously languishing in an ever growing product backlog. The Calcey team built several applications from scratch as well, including one for the Nelly team to monitor its performance during Black Friday 2017 – when it received record high traffic.
Smooth operating processes and a good understanding between the teams, helped Calcey develop the required Android app in quick time as well. The app is to be released publicly by the end of June 2018. Developed from scratch, the app is a key part of Nelly’s strategy in further establishing their market share and reach, and a crucial part of its engagement with Calcey.
A win-win for all
Calcey’s team work closely with the Nelly team in Borås and use multiple tools to communicate and coordinate, such as Youtrack for project management, Slack for communication and Skype for calls. The two different time zones the teams operate in has worked to the advantage of the partnership, optimising productivity and efficiency.
The Calcey team, starting the day earlier than the Nelly team, is able to fully sink their teeth into tasks assigned the day before by the time their Swedish counterparts start their day. This allows for a more informed and productive discussion during the teams’ daily sync-up call, when the Nelly team get to work in the morning.
Likewise, when a Calcey engineer submits work at the end of his work day, his counterpart at Nelly is able to review the work overnight and have feedback waiting for him when he arrives at work the next day.
Technologies: Native, .NET, AngularJS, Elasticsearch, Couchbase
Impact
The extended team allows Nelly to draw on skills from a larger pool of dedicated developer talent than that available at home, making way for increased focus and quicker delivery times. The arrangement also allows Nelly the flexibility to scale resources up or down and add developers with different skill sets to team as required to tackle the diverse challenges in its technology roadmap.
The opportunity to be stationed in Sri Lanka to work alongside Calcey’s team is a welcome change of scenery and weather for the Nelly team members who are seconded to Colombo. They have taken full advantage of the opportunity, relishing their time in Calcey’s beautiful island home; travelling around the country, making friends, creating lifelong memories, while providing the Calcey team hands-on support to ensure success all around, a win-win indeed.
