Gofore is an expert company in digitalization. I work there as a technical project manager on several projects.
When I started at Gofore in 2012, the company was quite small, less than thirty employees. Now we have almost 600. In addition to Finland, we have offices in Germany, Estonia and Spain. At the same time, we have developed our project policies so that we can work with the same project on multiple locations.
International team
Our X-Road team employs workers from several countries. Although the cultures are a bit different, we have a very like-minded bunch of software developers. Cultural differences have not caused any difficulties.
We do the development work in two-week periods, and at the end of each period we arrange a retrospective meeting. It aims to make things even better.
SmoothTeam improved our communication
There are many aspects to teamwork in software projects: the technological perspective, the processes, and the people and communication. SmoothTeam helps to improve the latter, and we took advantage of the “Team Strengths” simulation as a retrospective. The session was attended by Finns, Estonians and Spaniards from Gofore, as well as our customers from Finland and Estonia.
SmoothTeam gave us a whole new perspective to look at what the team is doing. It is also important that the session was fun and the participants were in a good mood. We did not get just analysis, but also well-being.
In addition to the simulation, the report I received afterwards was interesting. I got interesting information about how team members see me in different situations. In addition, we learned personal background information on our coworkers that would not otherwise be disclosed in work meetings.
I recommend SmoothTeam to a wide variety of teams, regardless of the industry. SmoothTeam helps improve teamwork and team members to better understand each other.
Ilkka Seppälä
Technical project manager
Gofore Oyj