Setting the Baseline for BFI Burgenland's Digital Transformation
Facts
- Client
- BFI Burgenland
- Services
- Discovery Phase
About the Company
BFI Burgenland is one of Austria's largest adult education institutes, aiming to offer affordable continuing education and counteract a skill shortage in the Austrian economic system.
They are the ones to ask the questions: what skills set do Austrian companies currently need? And how can we close that gap?
The organization works with the unemployment institutes, international organizations and coporate companies. Through their collaboration they help individuals retrain and gain a valuable skill set. The institute successfully fills that gap and wants to remain competitive in the market. Around 70-80% of candidates who participate in continuing education at the BFI find a new position.
We talked to Managing Director Jürgen Grandits & External Consultant Michael Strobl-Halper — one of their trusted partners for many years now — about the discovery phase they underwent with TRIGO. And how it became crystal clear that customized software would help them gain a competitive advantage and improve employee engagement.
The challenge: ensuring a successful digital transformation
Driven by the fast-paced labor market, it recently became clear that BFI Burgenland needed to make some changes — to work in a more agile way and react to labor market demands faster and keep up with the competition.
Led by Managing Director, Jürgen Grandits, BFI Burgenland is currently undergoing a huge digital transformation — aiming to transfer and automate as much as possible throughout the digital transformation process. BFI Burgenland brought Michael on board as their external consultant to support this process — and ensure it runs smoothly.
They came to TRIGO with specific requirements and with systems already in place. First and foremost, the challenges and questions they came to TRIGO with were:
- Should we build or buy our custom software?
- What value would it bring for the BFI users if we built it? Is it going to be a USP?
- What processes can we automate using the software?
- How are we going to go about it?
- How much is it going to cost?
- What will the product roadmap and design look like?
Requirements we needed to fulfill
The technology needed to allow the BFI Burgenland users to:
- move away from planning educational lectures in Excel but rather have an intuitive dashboard to plan and run them (sometimes even over the course of several years)
- show how many trainer hours have been booked and how many resources are available so they are not overbooked
- allow trainers to be able to document how many people are present in a lecture and how many hours they invested into the course
- provide an automated system documenting whether attendees are present or not
- gather all of this information and data in one place so BFI Burgenland can make strategic decisions
- enhance trainee's and attendee's day-to-day experience — create a great user experience rather than be a burden
Our solution: A Discovery Phase
The first thing we did was user research. Next, we talked to BFI Burgenland's customers and team — the people who will be using the software. Throughout this process, it became evident that employees were engaged in their work, could see issues with the current system, and were motivated to be a part of the overall digital transformation
We pinpointed their main pain points and then turned these findings into solid wireframes, designs, and a feature roadmap for the client's first development sprint. This showed the possibilities of the technology and gave the client the option whether they wanted to develop the solution — or not. One of the significant upsides of the discovery phase for clients is — whether they decide to develop a software with us or not — they have incredible insights into their users and can work with these outcomes moving forward.
How we work together
What was once an extended initial discovery phase — has now turned into regular increments of discovery phases. We regularly have contact with Michael and the BFI Burgenland once a week in our stand-up and initiate frequent discovery phases to adjust and set the product roadmap. Agility at its best.
Outcome
Both - external IT consultant Michael Strobl-Halper & BFI Burgenland benefited hugely from this discovery phase; these were just some of the findings they gained by trusting us:
Going into the project, it wasn't clear for management whether a software could set them apart from the competition; it turns out it will be a significant USP.
Another aspect the client didn't necessarily expect was that employee engagement was high when it came to the topic of digital transformation. This baseline is vital for the successful implementation of technology.
BFI also got to see some first design mockups of the software to give them a taste of where the journey could go.
The team also received a solid product roadmap which set the baseline for initiating the development process and speeds things up big time.
How this benefited the client
Overall the BFI Burgenland is still benefiting from the discovery phase; these were just some benefits consultant Michael Strobl-Halper & Managing Director Jürgen mentioned:
- Risk management: building software is a significant investment, and doing a discovery phase ensured that the company was moving in the right direction before a single line of code was written
- Ensures the success of tech implementation: whether the software will be successful depends on many things, not just how good the code is. The discovery phase allows us to analyze the business, detect threats, and identify opportunities to ensure the implementation will be successful.
- Confident kick-off of software development: by the end of the discovery phase, we were all confident that product development was the right move in the right direction. All the stakeholders involved knew how the other parties worked and whether they could collaborate long-term. Now we're developing BFI Burgenland's software together and can't wait to see what's next.
As a Managing Director one of the most important factors in every decision I make is: how much is it going to cost us. The Discovery Phase allowed us to map out: what our needs are, what type of software we needed to develop, and how many resources it would require. The team went out and spoke to people working in and with the BFI Burgenland — we had insight and confirmation that making this investment would benefit the entire organization and our customers. After going through the Discovery Phase, I knew what developing our custom software was going to cost us, truly understood the investment, and could confidently make the decision. TRIGO offers great value for the service you get.
Jürgen Grandits
Managing Director BFI Burgenland
Kerstin Manninger
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