Our Perficient colleagues share how they live and breathe our core values. Here, Anandh Asokan, director, Solutions, Delivery, and Client Services, writes about his experiences working on innovative API and integration client solutions with his Minneapolis colleagues.
Challenges excite me. At Perficient, the sky is the limit. Whenever I hear a customer say, “this is how we have always done it,” I hear a potential opportunity for change and an exciting start of a new customer journey.
Teamwork Brings the Best Results
At Perficient, we encourage everyone to be a self-starter, explore new technologies, and bring newfound knowledge back to the team. I believe “culture drives innovation” and always seek opportunities to provide value to our clients by continuous learning and improvement.
My team is a mix of junior and senior developers. The mentorship that organically happens every day ensures that less-experienced colleagues are on a fast track to success. Our Minneapolis team also hosts monthly Tech Talks to bridge the gap between learning a certain technology and understanding its real-world use cases.
Perficient’s culture of enablement gives every colleague an opportunity to drive client value. I employ the same management approach with my team. Everyone is equally accountable for the product delivery, and the result is a self-driving team and high-quality deliverables.
Innovation Informs Our Approach
In January 2018, I was honored to receive an entrepreneurial award for my work at a client site. At the start of the engagement, our client was looking to enhance the customer experience across multiple channels. With more than 10 years of experience in the API domain, Perficient has instilled confidence from the start, but every customer journey presents itself with a unique set of challenges. This is where my entrepreneurial mindset and ability to translate a client’s creative vision into a working solution came into play. The key question driving the project: How can the solution we are creating support innovation across the company?
To figure that out, my team entered a discovery phase with the Quick Start Rule Book, which helped us evaluate the current state and analyze gaps in the client’s digital presence. The development team simultaneously worked on a proof of concept (POC), which included work on the legacy platforms and new tools, such as APIM management, continuous integration / delivery, and microservices using Java Spring Boot. The thorough analysis backed by the tangible results of the POC inspired the client leadership to continue their collaboration with Perficient.
Collaboration Increases Client Value
A genuine technology shift cannot be successfully implemented without streamlining the business process and fundamentally rethinking the current frameworks. Our Perficient team advocated the introduction of agile within the client’s IT department.
The results – delivered in two-to-three-week increments – enabled our client to see the actual value of the product being developed and enhanced functionality based on continuous feedback and team retrospectives. This approach established a customer-first experience where cross-functional teams replaced business and IT silos to achieve a common goal. In addition, Perficient partnered with the client to create a DevOps culture, introducing tools to automate deployment and provisioning to accelerate the development process. This decreased the time to market to deliver actual business value.
MORE FROM OUR COLLEAGUES
Perficient colleagues share what our core values mean to them as part of our special “We Value” series.
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