Introducing Appsfactory
Appsfactory is one of Germany’s leading agencies for software development. The agency has over 15 interdisciplinary teams consisting of developers, QA and design staff as well as project managers.
The company provides end to end software development services, including:
- implementing individual software
- creating responsive websites
- implementing individualized back-end solutions for the real-time transmission of machine data
- chatbots implementation
- cloud services and hosting with Azure
- internet of things to control various devices via an app
- machine learning
- design thinking
- VR and AR development and many more
Appsfactory was founded in 2009 by Dr. Alexander Trommen (CEO), Dr. Roman Belter (COO) and Dr. Rolf Kluge (CTO).
Jan Nowak, the VP Projects and Technology, is leading the Project Department as well as the AI Department within Appsfactory. The team consists of more than 200 team members, who are distributed across four offices around Germany – Hamburg, Leipzig, Munchen and Erfurt.
Face to face vs online retrospectives
With four offices and sites across Germany, and most of the team members working with multiple clients at the same time, Appsfactory has found it challenging to find the right time and place where everyone can meet together for an engaging and regular retrospective.
With COVID-19, this challenge has escalated even more as teams work remotely and face to face gatherings are more restricted.
Finding the right online retrospective tool
CTO Rolf Kluge decided to look for options to run online retrospectives so that all team members can get involved wherever they are located or working from. They came across TeamRetro as one of their options for an enterprise-ready online retrospective tool for remote teams.
The Appsfactory team trialled TeamRetro before deciding to continue with the platform to run their subsequent online retrospectives.
“Retrospectives are an important part of our team’s culture and work methodology. We recognise retrospectives as enablers for change for the better, improvements to the way we work and stronger collaboration with each other and our clients.”
“We are pursuing the goal of making retrospectives in all teams more efficient by using the TeamRetro tool.”
Using TeamRetro for agile retros & team health checks
The Appsfactory team enjoyed the easy to use interface of the TeamRetro platform, with both the agile retrospective and team health check functionalities being stand out features that helped them run successful and efficient online retrospectives.
“The feedback from our evaluation was quite impressive. All participants were amazed by the easy to understand design and the significance of time being saved by running the entire process digital from the beginning to the end.”
“The agile retrospective feature is amazing, when it comes to fast collaborative retrospectives.”
“The team health check is a very insightful tool for our team leads, so that they can monitor the team happiness level closely.”
Online retrospectives increases productivity & satisfaction
Jan Nowak commented that the stand out benefits of using TeamRetro have been the ability for the AppsFactory teams to reduce the time spent on their online retrospectives vs conducting a face to face format.Of course with time savings also comes cost savings as team members are able to be part of the online retrospectives wherever, whenever they need to join, eliminating elements such as travel costs and time away from doing client work.
This in turn helps to create more satisfied and engaged teams throughout the organization.
“We could reduce our average time spent on retrospectives by more than 50%, while increasing the satisfaction level of the team at the same time.”
“We are also very happy about the very supportive sales team and the flawless on-boarding procedure.”
Try TeamRetro
If you are also looking to solve issues of distributed teams or remote working when it comes to running engaging and effective retrospectives, why not give TeamRetro a go?
We offer a FREE 30 days trial and offer demos to help make your online retrospectives a success for you, your teams and the whole organization.