Velocity Partners and CoStar: 3+ Years and Still Growing

Grady Bryant is the Vice President of Product Development at CoStar Group headquartered in Washington, DC. Grady joined CoStar in late 2011 and found that they were struggling with their offshore execution model. There were really two problems that he found with their India team – attrition was around 50% and the 10 plus hour time zone difference made working together as teams incredibly difficult.

CoStar Group’s focus is on Real Estate domain where they bring large scale, high performance, and distributed systems into play for their clients. Their teams are as widely dispersed as their products, mostly influenced by company acquisitions. So any partner that works with them needs to be highly skilled not only from a technology perspective, but also in working with highly distributed teams.

Grady found Velocity Partners three years ago, soon after joining CoStar. He said it was a fortuitous find in that he was unaware of our firm. He was simply looking for a new outsource partner that might have a better grip on his challenges. What he initially found in us that attracted him was:

  • A US Based company with a seasoned and engaged leadership team
  • A nearshore model to reduce large time zone communications deficits
  • A team culture of western engagement and engineering innovation
  • And finally, much lower attrition rates

And more than three years later the relationship continues to grow and strengthen to the point of having more than 30 Velocity Partners team members as part of his CoStar product development efforts.

Agile Multiplier

Soon after starting their relationship with Velocity Partners, Grady and his colleagues decided to transform the CoStar technical teams by moving to more agile approaches – Scrum in this case.

He made the interesting observation that:

“Often organizations make the move to agile and quickly find that it’s much harder than it looks. You see it’s as much a mindset change as it is a software methodology, As with anything involving change, it’s often a challenge to get your teams moving. We found that Velocity Partners has deep, broad, and practical understanding of what “good Agile” execution looks like.

And the good news is that they not only augmented our delivery efforts, but they helped our teams increase our agile adoption efforts. They served as a role model and mentor for us that truly helped accelerate our agile adoption efforts.

And not only that, they continue to keep us (and themselves) honest about agile continuous improvement within our teams.”

We’ve always felt that this is a strong differentiator for Velocity Partners. That is:

  • We hire incredibly bright technical people from world-class university systems. And we give them the tools, training, and career development to keep them engaged;
  • We’ve been practicing and fine-tuning our agile chops for nearly a decade. We cannot only spell agile, but our team members have it deeply rooted in their DNA;
  • And finally, our folks are engaged. They become as passionate and connected to your customers as you are. They don’t simply write code when asked, but the instead try to solve your and your customers largest challenges.

Team Investment

Towards the end of our conversation Grady made an important point. It was related to an upcoming trip he and two others were making to our Uruguayan office in the spring of 2015.

He said –

“One of our biggest challenges has been communications. Not only has video conferencing been an issue, but raw network throughput. The method we use for our Velocity teams seem bea less thanefficient way of logging into our virtual environments in order to code and test.

So next week we’re taking down a virtual conference node to increase our collaboration effectiveness. We’ll also be looking over our team members shoulders to try and figure out how we improve development efficiency over the network. They seem to be struggling working remotely and we want them to be as efficient as our own developers.

And finally, we’re taking down a lot of “swag” as a way of rewarding our team members.”

You can clearly see by the above that Grady and CoStar have embraced their nearshore team members as part of their “family”. Our performance is his performance and he’s partnering with us to focus on continuous improvement of our distributed team communication and efficiency.

What a wonderful testament to our partnership. On a related note, Grady spoke about reserving budget for cross-site visits by team members and the fact that CoStar has invited Velocity team members to participate in their annual developers conferences.

Thank you

We want to truly thank Grady for taking the time to provide his insights and feedback on our long-standing relationship. He was very gracious.

Bob Galen, our Agile Coach and Evangelist, conducted the interview and captured these notes in late April 2015. All errors of any sort are Bob’s.