Our Business Engineers are key players in the successful digital transformations of local and national governments. Enabled by information technology, it is their mission to develop software that supports these governments in their increasingly complex administrations. But what is it like to work as a Business Engineer at BearingPoint Caribbean? In this series “Recruiter Talks”, our recruiter Shadee Braun had a chat with Floor Vermeer, who has been with us for a little over 5 years. As a Junior Be Informed Architect, he is responsible for performing analyses, creating work packages, and developing software in the Be Informed studio.
What do Business Engineers do?
We use the Be Informed business process platform for our software development. When the functional designs for the customer are ready, we translate these into how it should be developed within the application, work it out further and, consequently, we build it with the team. We work in an integrated team of Designers, Product Owners, Developers, and Project Managers according to our own interpretation of scrum. As a Business Engineer you are then responsible within this team for developing the application. Because we work in an integrated team, it can sometimes also happen that you are requested to join the Design team to help complete the functional design when the need is high. And vice versa, it is also possible that a Design team member will do a bit of developing. It all depends on the priorities at that moment. That is sort of how we work.
Seems like a lot of interaction within the various teams. Could you briefly explain the role of the team members?
Firstly, Design kicks off with the functional design of how something should work. They agree with Client Engagement and Project Managers on the specific client requirements so that the Business Engineers can take their wishes into account when building the application. Secondly, Development comes in for the feasibility and, together with Design and the Product Owners, we determine what is within the scope of the upcoming release. The Product Owners have the final say in the latter. We have automated various tasks of Deployment that we can perform during production. After thorough testing and when the application is ready for release to the client, Deployment will take care of the final green light when the software is actually good to go.
What is it like to work with the Be Informed platform?
Because it is a low-code development platform, you can put things together rather quickly. We are not entering code and spending half a day looking for an error if you have wrongfully typed a dot instead of a comma. Building applications with the Be Informed platform ensures that you as a Business Engineer can focus on more important things like for example, did I build according to the architecture? Or how well constructed is it functional wise? Instead of worrying about a dot or comma, syntax becomes less important.
Truth be said, as with any other platform there are some limitations, but compared to existing coding platforms, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. And if there is anything we cannot do with Be informed, we always have the option to add it ourselves. We have several colleagues with the expertise to build extra functionalities in Be Informed as an add-on. So, if it is necessary, we will do it.
How do you stay focused within your team, while also heading in the same direction?
We have a daily stand up where we discuss how things are going. We also agreed to have kick-off sessions with Design, Product Owners, and Business Engineers when we start with a certain component in the development process. These are regular meetings to keep all team members involved on project level and on the same page. Furthermore, we have sprint reviews, retro, and planning meetings every three weeks. The reviews are broader and provide insights into what we are doing companywide, including stakeholders from Management who are not involved in the daily meetings.
Join our global mission! We're hiring.
Our Development unit is growing and we’re looking for Be Informed Specialists. Enabled by information technology, you provide the tools and support to enhance government revenues, resulting in more funding for key priorities for citizens, such as education and health.
That is how we organize our projects, but we also share knowledge and experience to keep each other on top of our area of expertise. We hold knowledge sessions to get new colleagues up to speed as quickly as possible: here we explain how certain things work or how we handle certain things. And once a month we also organize a meeting we call “Modeling Mondays” with all modelers to discuss topics such as the latest developments in IT, training material, or what it is that we want to improve on the platform.
It goes without saying that we expect a certain degree of independence to stay informed about the latest developments within the Be Informed platform by reading the release notes of new Be Informed versions and looking at the new functionalities. As a Business Engineer, these are the moments and ways we use to stay focused, up to date, and to get things going.
