Providing business continuity and assistance to fight a global pandemic – the Calcey experience

COVID-19 has brought the world to an unprecedented standstill. The crisis has also resulted in a working from home experiment at global scale. As a software product engineering company offering dedicated, remote teams for building digital products to technology companies in Silicon Valley, New York, London and Gothenburg – working remotely is part of Calcey’s DNA. However, having the whole company working from home instead of Calcey’s headquarters at Trace Expert City, was still a new experience.

Nevertheless, Calcey’s team has kept work going at the same velocity and in-line with all timelines committed to clients previously. As well as providing business continuity at a time of high uncertainty, Calcey’s also making crucial contributions to the efforts of some of its clients battling the epidemic.

A team from Calcey is currently working around the clock, from their homes, building modules to support Fresh Fitness Food (FFF)’s efforts to provide meals for frontline NHS workers. FFF is a scale-up offering meals tailored to individual needs and health goals, delivered to door in London. FFF has been on a steep growth trajectory in recent months – after having digitized its processes end-to-end, with a customer and workflow management solution built by Calcey. It is now facing unprecedented demand as its offering has become a magnet for Londoners facing a shortage of food supplies.

Another Calcey client – Compare Networks, a technology company based in California, supplying media and platform products for life sciences and healthcare industries, operates Biocompare.com, a global market place for the lifesciences products, providig anitbodies and testing resources, along with millions of other products, for researchers racing to find cures for COVID-19. Calcey’s team has been building and maintaining all technology platforms for Compare for almost a decade and continues this work unabated, during this crucial period.

Calcey has been able to manage this shift to working from home, relatively smoothly due to quick contingency planning by the management and internal processes that support this style of working. Several weeks ago Calcey’s team conducted a companywide working-from-home test run to check whether everyone had access to all devices and systems needed. Testing devices (typically shared between multiple QA personnel) was identified as a bottleneck and a device cloud solution was set up to address this. Calcey has been working on setting up reporting and team management structures to increase self-governance capacity of its teams, make problems and output more easily visible and allow the company’s internal knowledge and experience base to be tapped easily by anyone, for some time. Coupled with Calcey’s well established responsibility driven culture, these processes have eased the transition to a completely distributed company, while ensuring business continuity and reliable service delivery to its clients at this crucial time.