Working remotely has its benefits but sometimes is good for certain projects, to have a closer contact with the customers. In fact, meeting our customers is one of the key aspects of our methodology and we believe it is important to meet us in person at least once, specially for long term projects and relationships.
In many occasions we have travelled to work at the customers’ offices and in other opportunities the customer has travelled down here to meet with us.
In 2005 we received the first visit of a customer from the UK. We were working in his startup idea and he decided to rent a place here in Buenos Aires. It was a very productive move because we had the opportunity to work together for three months with the customer and other of his collaborators on the same table.
Preparing a demo for the customer in our office in Buenos Aires.
We have a long record of travels to Mexico as well. We usually provide services to customers in the automotive industries for their plants in Mexico. So we travelled many times to cities like Aguascalientes and Cuernavaca, places where automotive plants are very important. We travelled approximately 15 times to México for meetings, installations and support to our customers in Mexico. So there you have another skill in our set: we support spicy food like the best!
Working in Cuernavaca.
All set to work in Aguascalientes.
Working from the datacenter in Mexico.
Other destination we have travelled to many times is Texas. Mainly for meetings, planning and support, we have travelled to Dallas to work from the customer offices. The first time we went there was for a GOT (General Operation Testing) of a project we were building for another customer. We spent two weeks working with the users of the system, testing, reviewing the work done and gaining important feedback.
Travel to Dallas
The latest trips we have done have been to Costa Mesa, California. We are working in a new project for a customer who makes printers so we decided to boost up the project with three weeks of intense work from his office. I travelled there with Jose, one of my partners, and it was very positive because not only could we meet the customer but we could also see the printers we were working with closely, perform real life tests and also visit one of the beta users of the system we were building.
Testing the project at customer’s office.
Our work place in Costa Mesa, California.
Returning home after 3 weeks of work in USA.
Author: Marcelo Ruiz
Marcelo has been working as a software developer for more than 15 years. He has participated in projects for companies in USA, Mexico, Argentina, Europe and Africa. He is skilled with Microsoft technologies such as ASP.NET, MVC, C#, WCF and SQL Server, among others.