The Year in Review: Agiliway 2020 Recap

Whilst everyone is looking forward to 2021, we in Agiliway invite you to look back at our 2020. Indeed, what a year we’ve had. The COVID-19 has definitely been a storm hit for the entire planet. Something that was expected to have lasted for a few months, eventually, has shut down the planet for almost a year now. The impact of the pandemic on the global economy is heavy. Many businesses worldwide had to reduce their staff whilst some didn’t survive the lockdowns and closed.

For Agiliway, as for most of the businesses, 2020 brought both negative and positive experiences. We had to learn a lot of how-to immediately with the minimum harm to the business, be flexible and open to changes.

Though we are finishing the 2020 year with a positive result, we need to mention about drawbacks this year has brought, such as the crises that led us to make some unpopular decisions to keep our employees busy during the first lockdown. Another negative thing was the cancellation of our business trips and meetings with our European and American clients as well as their trips to Ukraine. Unfortunately, we lost a few clients (yet, on the bright side, we gained more new ones) who paused the cooperation due to their financial issues. There were a number of conferences our specialists were supposed to attend as speakers; however, these were postponed to a later time. And, finally, we didn’t manage to complete our plan for the annual growth in terms of the number of team members.

Fortunately, Finest Moments Prevail This Year (Our Achievements)

The main positive characteristics of our 2020

We are grateful to see that a lot of positive things happened within 2020. We’d like to focus on that rather than on the negative side. We made significant efforts to improve and optimize all of our internal processes, hence, we managed to achieve a lot, including:

• Team growth. Although, we didn’t meet our planned growth for the number of staff members, yet, we end this year with more people aboard than we started with.
• Financial situation. Regardless of 2020 being extremely turbulent for many businesses, the company managed to close a year in the black. Having a positive financial capability by the end of the year allowed resuming salary revisions and their increase, investing in the company growth, and hiring new specialists.
• Personal development. We are inspired by the dedication of our team and consider boosting performance as one of the key factors of high productivity. This year was remarkable for the company since we’ve launched a series of webinars where we discuss healthy lifestyle, personal growth and business development. Our senior employees share their knowledge and experience through the mentorship program. There is also a series of lectures given by our TOP management that aims at giving more insight into the company goals and vision for growth.
• Remote work & new meetings format. It’s a no brainer that working remotely has become a new normal. It was crucial to ensure remote processes are as effective as if people were working from the office. The company had immediately got down to rebuilding and optimizing the internal processes to ensure the same performance level as it was before the quarantine. Thus, the mandatory lockdown pushed our processes implementation forward, and everything planned to be introduced to our daily operations gradually had to happen sooner than it was envisaged. Nonetheless, it didn’t harm the performance and was quite the opposite. Today 50% to 70% of the team continues working from home, which means that the elaborated processes are effective and do not impact the performance.
• Improvement of our own product – CiviMobile. The latest release of CiviMobile 5.4 was one of the most important and most requested releases. The mobile version is now fully compatible with the Drupal 8 version of CiviCRM. The functionality of the CiviCRM is extended and covers all the needs of the users on-the-go. Thus, you get access to the data, their collection, and management, communication, payments, etc. everywhere and at any time.
• Certified partnership with Microsoft. Becoming Microsoft Silver Partner is a significant step in demonstrating and approving the technical capabilities of our engineers as well as the company’s expertise in delivering a vast range of solutions in the MS domain. Silver competency grants our clients the exclusive opportunities for support benefits Microsoft has to offer.
• Improvement of security policies and internal practices has allowed us to start preparing for passing security certification.

Our clients

1. 1. Geographical expansion of our client base. We are very proud to have expanded our client base distribution from the initially targeted Northern American countries to the global level. So far, we have provided software development, IT consulting, and BPO services to clients from Europe, both Americas, and Asia. The new partners this year joined us from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Kyrgyzstan. Which extends our service distribution map to 19 countries within the 5 years of Agiliway operations.
2. 2. BPO department enlargement and success. Our BPO department VAfromEurope offers a wide range of services like personal assistants, SEO audits, data entry, customer support, SMM. A year ago, we opened a new direction to it – call center. It has shown significant growth in providing service to 6 hospitals so far. Last year it was one.
3. 3. Strengthening of the Business Development direction. This year was crucial in terms of gaining new clients through cold sales. Before this, most of the companies contracting for our services were coming from our existing clients and their references.
4. 4. Webinars instead of roadshows. Since there was not much intense travel happening in 2020, we had to cancel all the roadshows, business trips, client visits, and face-to-face meetings we planned. These all went online. We launched a series of webinars with our seasoned professionals to share the experience and promote our products as well as the products of our partners.

Growing our expertise and professional level

The lockdown and reduction of the working hours have become a great opportunity for our engineers and consultants to study more and improve their expertise. Most of our team members managed to complete a lot of professional courses, participate in different webinars, hence, become even better and stronger specialists in their respective fields.

Amidst our initiatives are the launch of the personal development programs called Agiliway Knowledge Center which aims at encouraging professional growth and knowledge sharing inside the company:

• The mentorship program is a great tool to promote knowledge-sharing and build stronger connections among the team members. Senior and middle-level engineers help our junior specialists with learning new technologies or stacks as well as consult them in the arising questions through the work processes and projects.
• Internal Training aim at giving insights and understanding of certain processes of the IT world. Every week seasoned professionals present lectures on the topic of their choice, usually based on their sphere of expertise. These are conducted for the Sales and Marketing Department, HRs, PMs, QAs, software developers to keep them updated on the latest tech trends along with the industries the company is involved in.
• Webinars on a variety of topics from physical and mental health to teamwork and dynamics, self-branding, client proposals, and many more. We invite professionals of their respective spheres as well as our team members to conduct the webinars and share their experience and teach us something new.

Enhancing our proficiency in the existing scope of domains was also another focus for the company this year. Having the necessary experience in developing projects for multiple industries has proven Agiliway as a reliable partner and software development service provider. The appropriate and extensive expertise allows us successfully operate, consult, and provide services within the eLearning, Retail, HR, Fintech, Healthcare, Hospitality, Logistics, Media, NGOs sectors. The reliable and professional relationship with the clients is the key to long-term and trustworthy cooperation and further recommendations and references.

Next, we’d like to focus more on a product for NGOs, since it pushed us to get down to working on our own product.

CiviMobile

The cooperation, we had with a political party that requested a custom CRM for managing their internal processes and membership, led Agiliway to begin working on our own product, CiviMobile, which we started after a successful release of customized Civi9CRM for our client, eventually turned into one of the most successful products on the market for NGOs.

The 2020 accomplishments of the product are impressive considering the difficulties most businesses encountered. To start with, we significantly improved the existing solution along with adding a lot of new features. Secondly, the number of CiviMobile users has grown exponentially during the year. The high demand for the product, especially this year, urged us to reorganize a CiviMobile department so that a devoted team of engineers and support staff could provide the best user experience from CiviMobile.

Social life

Overcoming the COVID-19 pandemic together

During these challenging times, we would like to thank every member of the Agiliway team from the Chernivtsi and Lviv offices for being kind and generous. At the beginning of the pandemic, we managed to raise funds for purchasing the necessary means of protection for our doctors, who are the first responders in the battle against the SARS-COV-2 virus.

…ending the year on a happy note

This year Agiliway reached an important milestone and turned 5. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, we were unable to celebrate as we usually do, hence, we arranged gift boxes delivered to our employees and we celebrated the anniversary online. This was a very unusual experience, however, we realized that we are a great team of like-minded people who can have fun even if we aren’t together.

Every year we celebrate St. Nicholas day organizing different activities for our employees’ children to enjoy. This holiday season we had a special delivery of Agiliway branded hoodies for our smallest team members.

We are pleased and grateful for everything we’ve had and what is yet to come. We sincerely hope that 2021 will be brighter and healthier, full of positive changes. May the year to come to be prosperous and your business grows stronger and bigger.

Agiliway team wishes you the merriest holidays and Happy New Year.