Guest blog: My experiences in digital transformation with Innofactor - Metso Oyj

by Jesper Aaen, Digital Program Manager at Metso

I was asked to write a guest blog post about my experiences in collaborating with Innofactor for Metso. As my experiences were highly positive, I found it easy to comply with this request.

In my experience, key factors in ensuring successful digital transformations is a good vendor partnership providing the technical expertise, a committed team and true agile development practices. Our partnership with Innofactor proved a success.

The collaboration between Metso and Innofactor had already started about seven months before I was brought into the project.

The project began with a Proof-of-Concept and an architecture proposal. Microsoft Azure was chosen as the platform for the project and Innofactor was selected as our partner.

Both Metso and Innofactor team embraced true agile development

By the time I joined, I was impressed with the setup. The core team was working in the same physical space, and you could see a culture of open dialogue between the Innofactor Scrum team, the Metso product owner and the business users. The team used agile collaboration tools and video conferencing to bring business users closer to the development team.

The application was taken into real use by business early on, and incrementally updated with new features every two weeks, which ensured fast user and business feedback, and gave us the ability to steer the application to serve the users.

For agile software development to work well in a client-vendor relationship, it requires not only dedication to the agile processes from both the vendor and the client, but more importantly a dedication to the core themes of agile: People, collaboration, always learning and continuous delivery. It was visible that Innofactor had already embraced the framework whole-heartedly.
In my experience, the set-up both on client side and Innofactor side were one of the key factors ensuring successful delivery of a digital transformation of our business.

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I am now stepping down from the on-going collaboration with Innofactor and will be focusing on other projects from now on. I thoroughly enjoyed working with the Innofactor team, and hopefully, we can collaborate further in the future again. But meanwhile, I would like to thank them for their dedication to the project and excellent work.