A Dickens of a time
January 6, 2025
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” perfectly summarizes 2024.
This part of the opening phrase from Charles Dickens’ 1859 best-selling novel, “A Tale of Two Cities” may originally speak of a class war, but it can apparently also be relevant in a real war. Let us elaborate, especially on some of the better things that have come to pass in 2024.
During the war, our extended Ukrainian community has changed, and some would argue for the better. The hardships that have been thrust upon our people have also made us pull together.
"The hardship has strengthened our shared culture and the underlying values that we use as our compass.
It is heartwarming to see people support each other as our team does."
- Nicolai Krarup, COO at Global Mediator
At the other end of the emotional spectrum, it is almost impossible to comprehend that we are in the third year of war without a clear end in sight and a continuation of the conditions that torment our team. Even stranger to realize that running a business in these circumstances is still, “running” a business, and that we are quite good at pretending that what we do is “normal”.
Running a business in these circumstances is still “running” a business
New discoveries
Over a year ago, we realized that the process for migrating Business Central solutions to the cloud needed a dramatic redesign. The gap between old NAV and a modern cloud-based ERP solution that Business Central is, has simply become too big for the process of "shoveling" old code to a new environment to be adequate.
At the same time, we had experienced that many customers did not know what changes they had made over time to their solution. The combined organizational memory was simply not strong enough or well documented enough for them to know where to start their migration journey.
From this, our Discovery X-ray tool was born. Python-based, it allows us to automatically parse the code of the customer solution and that of the standard solution and identify any changes made, in Forms as well as in Pages. We can assign those changes to functional areas, and we can even look for possible namespaces to help with creating future architecture.
Discovery X-ray is the initial step in our 8-step Stairway to Cloud program with close to 20 analyses performed for customers after the summer holidays alone.
Partnering up with Crayon, we expect next year to be busy.
New engines
Our new customer portal launched in the autumn of the year is one of the final steps in a total redesign of our marketing engine designed to handle our interactions with different platforms and segments. It now also automates our interactions with CRM and Customer.io and the team has built an impressive array of data collection points.
This new portal enables our customers to interface with our project team in a much more structured and guided manner, as relevant information about our work methods and individual projects can be found there. Maybe most impressively, we have built a completely new backend that allows us to spin up private cloud development environments with ease.
Realizing that we, like many others, are increasingly running a multicultural hybrid organization, our portal for our team members has also been sharpened and improved. Even if a regular human touch is still needed, our processes now consider common circles of interest, mental health webinars and regular follow-ups other than status calls the new normal. We strongly believe that these initiatives have made us a very stable organization, even under extreme circumstances.
Overachieving
We are also continuously taking our own medicine. In 2024, we almost completed our migration to a single source of truth around our Business Central installation. You may think this should be easy for a company with our specialty, but migrating and consolidating three separate NAV instances with customized payroll administration takes time. Enhancing them with our fantastic Jira Connector and Worklogs Sync to Tempo, just increases the impact.
If you add it up, new tools, new processes, new marketing engine, enhanced HR tools, a continuation of our ISO certification in the latest version, and initiatives combined with a larger Business Central implementation - then this has been a super busy year. We have essentially rebuilt our foundation.
Now add to the above that not only have we done this while growing with our fantastic customers and staying profitable, but that we have done this with more than half of our team living in a country in war. From that perspective, you may understand why we still use the term “crazy amazing people” about our team.
We find it mind puzzling that sometimes you manage to act like it is the best of times, even if you live through what can equally well be described as the worst of times.
We stand strong, we plan to do the same next year.
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