This year continued cooperation with Thermo Fisher Scientific, helping building software products and managing of a (growing) team in Czech Republic. Great experience, many challenges, very nice team!

Working remote after several years became “second nature”, although coming time this may change and there will be opportunities to meet with team face to face. Exciting!

In meanwhile looking also for next steps in business expansion and new challenges ahead.

Unfortunately shadow of the continuing war in Ukraine still hangs and we keep unconditional support of the Ukrainian people fighting for their freedom and independence.

Слава Україні!

So there is something again to celebrate! And this year is again special. It is exactly 11 years ago, on 11-11-11 when the company was officially born!

Considering most startup lifespan is between 2 and 5 years old it is remarkable to realize that already for 11 years we’re serving the customers, acquiring new projects and helping to bring projects to the finish line.

Last year had several highlights.

New client

Although Thermo Fisher Scnentific is not a new name on the list, but this time the project is with the BEA (Bulk Elemental Analysis) division, which opened up a new chapter. Completely remote, working with team spread between the location in Brno, Czech Republic and Ecublens, Switzerland, many stakeholders involved. A lot of new domain knowledge acquired, very challenging project requiring a lot of attention, a true integration challenge and a lot of it not just in software.

Home office

With the remote client and working through pandemics, this year was continuing to be “the home office” year. Having to walk two floors down to a coffee machine helps to get some minimal exercises, but it definitely impacts the psychology of working “with people” versus “working next to people”. While it definitely adds to the efficiency (minimal / controlled disturbances), it also takes the social aspect away.

War in Ukraine

Well, despite this being a business blog I cannot express enough how the war in Ukraine hit the people involved directly or through their family and friends relations. People are getting killed and lifes are ruined in a total madness of a pointless war.

Our hearts are with Ukraine and we support ukrainian people and army with whatever means we can. Agression can never win and will be pusnished for all deeds.

Слава Україні! Героям слава!

So there is something to celebrate! Exactly 10 years ago on a nice 11-11-11 date the company was registered at the local Chamber of Commerce of the Dutch “Silicon Valley” located around Eindhoven. I was still recovering from an illness, but I didn’t want to miss the date, so I took myself there, and after a short discussion regarding paperwork I had my registration papers.

Actually thinking back, choosing the name was one of the most difficult parts :), but since once I have settled on the properties like “professional” and “intelligent” it wasn’t long before the name was born!

Looking at the past 10 years I am foremost thankful for my family who supported me in making decisions leaving some “stable” environments behind. I am also thankful to the clients who trusted me with projects and assignments and kept hiring me despite some changes in the market and eventual need to cut costs.

I think I was lucky to work in the environment that always seem to have work for people like myself requiring to put things together, dive into the infamous issue with “every single part is done but it just does not work together”. So basically putting the huge software LEGO figure together that was meant to be easy to assemble, but reality turned to be different. This represents a typical integration issue. And that’s the part that makes my heart beat faster, my interest to grow exponentially with the complexity of the problem and make me awake in the middle of the night wanting to continue investigating until a workable solution is found!

So, finally, if I had a chance, would I choose the same route? Yes, I would definitely do the same. From my perspective my current way of working provides the most “fair” way of working with my clients who pay for my efforts if they need it, but are free to “pull the plug” when my services are not needed anymore (without any hard feelings!). From my side I do see the results of my efforts if I go for an “extra mile” and I do not expect to be paid when taking a break :).

So we have officially passed the 95% threshold of the companies that fail in first five years :). And we are looking for doubling the number next year!

Last years new opportunities came by and new challenges came along with them :). Leading (interim) an integration team withing a complex and dynamic environment turned to be a very interesting and fitting pretty well with my prior experiences. Combination of daily hands-on troubleshooting, automation, roadmapping and project management ensures no day is the same and there are enough challenging puzzles to solve. This also gives a lot of ideas for further improvements and developments.

In parallel several initiatives are being explored to expand business, always on a lookout for the new opportunities!

Five year ago, on 11 November 2011 Profigent was registered at the Dutch Chamber of Commerce.

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Recently I had several interesting conversations each touching upon the interests of the outsourced parties and whether it is at all makes sense to perform (long-term) outsourcing.

So the basic idea is that unless you buy a ready-to-use product or a product that can be customized to your needs you end up with a piece of software that you need to improve by a party that in fact does not have any incentive to improve it! Actually the opposite is true – the more ‘work’ the outsourcer gets in a form of bugs, fixes, ‘redesigns’, etc the better is it to him, but not at all for the client. In this ‘vicious loop’ if the outsourcing party is doing their job ‘too good’ they run out of work. Oops, that’s not good. And of course not completely true, as there is always a lot of work and you don’t actually run out of it, you may only run out of money to do it all. And of course you run slower out of money when you get somewhat cheaper workforce… but do you?
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