How Boni Global succeeded to keep managing and delivering new innovative solutions?
- Tell us more about your background:
I am a 34 years old full stack developer. I was born in Balıkesir and studied until high school in Balıkesir. Then I went to Cyprus, Eastern Mediterranean University to study Computer Engineering.
After university, I came to Istanbul to work in 2011. For 9 years I have been working as a software engineer.
- How was your start with Boni Global , what is your role and why did you join the company?
In 2014 I joined Boni as an Android Developer. When I first came to Istanbul, I worked 2 years as a Backend Developer and I wanted to learn mobile application development at those times. The reason why I was looking for a job in mobile development. That’s how I started as an Android Developer at Boni Global. Sometimes we needed a backend developer and I switched back to backend as I have 2 years of backend development experience. After more than 6 years, I am still working for Boni Global.
For now, I am taking the role of CIO in the company and I am responsible for deploying B2B projects, 3rd party integrations with our products and managing suppliers.
- What project are you managing/delivering at the moment?
At Boni Global, we are always trying to develop solutions for the good of people and trying to make individuals’ lives easier.
When this pandemic happened, we immediately realized that we can help people with tech solutions. This is the way we represent ourselves to the world. We knew that we could help in some way. We searched for the global solutions and started to analyze how we can help.
This project has to be insanely fast! Because the virus is spreading very fast. We knew that we cannot help all the people. We had to fix some of the broken parts. So, we focused on industrial areas by helping the industry workers. Because some research shows that this covid-19 problem will continue more than we think, and somehow the economy must go back to the same. We cannot stay at home for 2 years. But also, we cannot ignore the risk.
Today we have successfully developed the Mess Safe application for Mess Turkiye.
- Can you tell us more about the delivery and project management nature of Mess Safe?
MESS Safe aims to solve covid-19 problems for the industry workers and to be a tool for work safety with the partnership of MESS and Boni Global. MESS has helped us a lot learning about the clients and what they need from the product since they already have a close relationship with lots of companies and they know how they operate their businesses. So, we immediately started developing the product. At the same time, we were trying to finalize the MVP features to launch the product to the clients.
The idea was to log every interaction if anyone gets closer to each other 1.5 meters and warn them with an alarm. With the record of these interactions, factory management can trace back the interactions and find a set of risky people if any covid-19 case happens.
In terms of project management; both MESS and we have assigned a group of very talented people dedicated to this project. To be fast, we split this group of people into five teams and started to work concurrently. From Project Management, Product, Sales, Marketing and Operations. Every team has their own regular meetings. And to be aligned, we set daily standup meetings every day. Thus, every team is updating each other in the daily stand ups. So, it is going very well and pretty fast for now.
- What are the issues you have faced during this project, working remotely?
For me the worst is the risk of the unknown. Not just because of the work. There are lots of things going on in people’s lives. Everything and every plan just stopped suddenly. It was like paralyzing at the beginning. We thought to get some precautions in the company but it was very unclear for us because none of us have experienced something like this before. So we just accepted and continue to do our jobs as always. We already had a remote working experience in Boni. And therefore we were able to adapt very well and quickly to remote working. It went very efficiently for us. Also, we saw that other companies adapted very quickly to remote working. So, nothing had stopped for us. We continue to work very efficiently. So, today we are not in a hurry to go back to the office.
- What were the last projects you were working on besides Mess Safe?
Before the MESS Safe project, we delivered IGA Loudsteps and AYT Video Call Kiosk projects. IGA loudsteps is a mobile indoor navigation app for blind people. We delivered an SDK for accessible navigation in the airport.
AYT Video Call Kiosk is a customer support kiosk application to help passengers with an online call. We delivered these two projects successfully just before the pandemic. As a matter of fact, we finished development of the AYT Video Call Kiosk project, but because of the corona virus the airport was closed. So, we still couldn’t launch it. We are waiting for the airport to start operating again then we will launch the application.
