How Bluedot Cut Costs and Moved Faster After Learning Agile

Bluedot Innovation is fast becoming a darling of the Melbourne tech startup ecosystem, having recently been featured in a Google case study on delivering 20 times the precision of traditional mobile location services using Google Maps API. The company has also raised over US$4.5m funding and expanded the business to the US by setting up offices in San Francisco.

Like any company experiencing rapid growth, it experienced some growing pains of its own, such as:

• running effective planning meetings
• scoping and iterations management
• estimating task effort and executing accordingly
• managing developer time efficiently

Bluedot engaged Collective Campus to give its team a better understanding of Agile software development and project management, in particular with respect to the SCRUM framework.

SCRUM is underpinned by the following principles:

• individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• working software over comprehensive documentation
• customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• responding to change over following a plan

We walked the team through an intensive 2-day SCRUM bootcamp in which they learned agile principles in addition to techniques related to as Scrum practices, requirements, project initiation, estimation and prioritisation, sprint planning, executing sprints, re-planning, closing a scrum sprint and closing a project.

The result?

The bootcamp had an almost immediate impact on team performance, generating the following feedback from its CTO, Balendran Thavarajah little more than a month after the bootcamp.

“After sending our developers to Collective Campus’s Scrum Bootcamp, we’ve noticed a remarkable difference in the team’s application of Scrum. We’re also getting more accurate estimations and have successfully completed two sprints since the training and as a result, are now doing a much better job of delivering value on time and on budget. This enables us to build and deliver product and features rapidly. I particularly liked Collective Campus’ hands on approach to training, and the customisation they were willing to build into the learning materials for us was very valuable”.

Bluedot’s engineering team is world class and they needed the Agile Scrum training from Collective Campus to reinforce the key themes of Agile product development.

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